This is a question that often comes up during meetings here at our free photo hosting site ClickAsnap. The bulk of our users are photographers who are very good at taking pictures, and we have supplied them a platform which they can upload these pictures to, and where they can sell them. However, most probably aren’t aware that very few members of the public want to purchase random pictures, potential purchasers are looking to buy what’s trendy at that time of the year.

So, how on earth do you know what is trendy and what photographs people want to buy at any given time of the year? The simple answer is Google, Google is the single biggest search engine in the world accounting for 92.01% of all search traffic. This means it has incredible insights into what people are looking for at any given time.

For example this gamer uses Google trends to identify popular games and keywords to make videos for so they are more likely to be found:

You access this data using Google Trends this amazing bit of software tells you in real time exactly what people are looking for.

Firstly bookmark this blog post, all of the embeds below update in real time. You can of course head to Google Trends and have a play yourself but this is the simplest way to see what is going on:

The box below shows what type of photos people are looking for over the last 7 days:

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This week, wedding photography is the number 1 topic, followed by art, portraits, studio and education. You can of course break these down by country, make the time frame longer of shorter and analyse trends.

Below is related searches over the last 7 days:

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What do you do next? Well, it’s quite simple, establish what you can photograph of the top 25 queries, go out there, get the photos, post them up with proper tags and descriptions and you should be able to catch some of that traffic. Of course if you can predict the trends, for example Christmas, then you can get in ahead of the curve and potentially reap huge rewards from being the first to post that particular subject at the right time. Although this does take an awesome amount of luck!

If you have any further tips please comment below!