The short version: The best hashtags for nature photography posts are a mix of mid-size niche tags (100,000 to 5 million posts), specific location tags, and a couple of community feature accounts, not the massive tags like #nature or #photography that everyone reaches for first. Use 8 to 12, not 30. And no, hashtags are not doing the heavy lifting they used to, but used the right way they still bring in real followers who care about the same things you do.
Why most hashtag lists you find are years out of date
I get asked this a lot by clients who shoot landscapes or wildlife alongside their main business, someone selling prints on the side, a countryside estate agent, a rewilding charity I do content for. They all Google “best hashtags for nature photography” and land on lists written in 2019 that still tell you to slap #nature, #photooftheday and #instagood on everything. Those tags have over a billion posts between them now. Your photo lands in that feed for about four seconds before it is buried under ten thousand others.
Instagram’s own head, Adam Mosseri, has said publicly more than once that hashtags do very little for reach compared to what your existing followers engage with in the first hour after posting. That is the bit most photography blogs quietly leave out because it makes for a less satisfying article. Hashtags have not disappeared as a tool. They have shrunk from “discovery engine” to “one small signal among many.” Treat them that way and you will not be disappointed when a well-hashtagged photo of a heron still only gets 40 likes.
The four types of hashtags that work
I stopped thinking of hashtags as one big pile years ago. They split neatly into four jobs, and a good set uses all four.
Broad reach hashtags (use one or two, no more)
- #naturephotography (around 180 million posts)
- #landscapephotography (around 90 million)
- #wildlifephotography (around 60 million)
- #natureaddict (around 15 million)
These get your photo into a big pool fast, but the shelf life is minutes, sometimes less. Use one, maybe two, purely so the odd algorithmic browse of the tag catches you at the right moment. Do not build your whole strategy around them.
Niche and technique hashtags (this is where the real followers live)
- #macrophotography or #macro_perfection for close-up shots
- #longexposure_shots for waterfalls and moving cloud
- #astrophotography or #nightskyphotography for stars and Milky Way shots
- #birdsofinstagram or #birdphotography for anything with feathers
- #minimalistlandscape if your style is bare and simple, mine leans this way
- #seascapephotography for coastal work
These sit in the 500,000 to 5 million post range. Smaller enough that a good photo can rank in the top posts for the tag, big enough that real strangers still browse them. This is where I see the best return, both for my own posts and for clients.
Location hashtags (the most underused of the four)
This is the one people skip and it is the one I would push hardest. #discoverscotland, #visitwales, #lakedistrict, #snowdonia, #jerusalemhills, #negevdesert, #dartmoor. Whatever place you shot in, tag it and tag it precisely. Nobody searches #nature to find a specific glen in the Highlands, but plenty of walkers, tourism boards, and local Instagram accounts do search #glencoe or #cairngorms specifically, and they repost. A tourism board reposting your shot to 80,000 followers does more for you than a broad tag ever will.
Community and feature account hashtags
- #earthfocus, run by an account that features landscape and wildlife shots to a following in the low millions
- #discoverearth
- #ourplanetdaily
- #wildernessculture
- #agameoftones for moody, edited landscapes
These are tags used specifically by curator accounts who repost the best submissions to their own audience, sometimes crediting you, sometimes not, but always sending some traffic back. Getting featured by one of these once can bring in more real followers in a day than three months of consistent posting.
A real example from a client’s account
I worked with a photographer based near Bourton-on-the-Water a couple of years back who shot Cotswolds landscapes as a side business alongside print sales. When I first looked at her Instagram, she was using 30 hashtags on every post, the maximum Instagram allows, mostly broad ones like #nature, #naturephotography, #beautiful, #photooftheday, stacked in a comment underneath the caption the way everyone was told to do it in 2018.
Her average reach per post was sitting around 400 to 600 views on a good day, most of it from existing followers, almost nothing new coming in. We cut her hashtags down to 9. Two broad (#landscapephotography, #ukphotography), four niche (#cotswoldsphotography did not exist yet as a widely used tag so we built one, alongside #foggymorning, #dronephotography, #goldenhour), two location (#cotswolds, #burfordphotography naming the actual village), and one community tag (#earthfocus). Within six weeks her average reach per post had moved to roughly 2,200, and she had picked up 340 new followers who were actual landscape photography enthusiasts, not random accounts. That is not a viral explosion. It is what a proper hashtag set, matched to a proper posting rhythm, does. Slow, steady, compounding.
Hashtags to leave off completely
Some tags are effectively dead weight or actively harmful now.
- #nature, #photography, #instagood, #photooftheday: all past 500 million to a billion posts, your photo is invisible in them within seconds
- #like4like, #followforfollow, #f4f: these attract bot accounts and engagement pods, which tank your reach with the algorithm because it reads the resulting engagement as low quality
- Any hashtag that has been flagged or restricted, which changes regularly, a quick way to check is searching the tag in the app and seeing if Instagram shows a note that recent posts under it are hidden due to reported content, this happens more with wildlife tags than people expect because of poaching and animal cruelty content getting reported under the same tags
Wildlife photographers in particular should check their favourite tags every few months. A tag can be perfectly healthy one year and quietly restricted the next because of unrelated content flooding it.
How many hashtags should you use
Instagram allows 30. Do not use 30. My working number for nature photography, based on testing across my own posts and half a dozen client accounts over the past three years, is 8 to 12. Enough to cover all four categories above without the caption or first comment looking like spam, which is exactly how it reads to anyone scrolling past, and how the algorithm can read it too when the ratio of hashtags to actual content gets too high.
Step by step, this is how I build a set for a new nature photography client in under twenty minutes:
- Search the subject in the Instagram search bar (heron, waterfall, autumn leaves, whatever it is) and note the top three related tags it suggests
- Pick one broad tag under 200 million posts
- Pick three or four niche tags between 500,000 and 5 million posts related to the technique or subject
- Add two or three location tags specific to the exact spot, not just the country
- Add one community or feature account tag they might repost to
- Put hashtags in the caption itself now, not the first comment, Instagram treats them the same way but a caption reads cleaner and you are less likely to forget to add the comment
Beyond hashtags: what is driving reach for nature photography in 2026
Here is the part that annoys people who want a tidy hashtag list and nothing else. Hashtags are maybe 10 to 15 percent of what gets a nature photography post seen now. The rest is caption quality, whether you write actual alt text describing the image (this feeds into Instagram’s own search and accessibility tools, and very few photographers bother), whether you post reels of the same shots rather than only static images, and whether you reply to every comment in the first hour, which signals to the algorithm that the post is worth showing to more people.
I say this as someone who spent years building an audience on social media before AI and algorithm changes reshaped everything, and I now help small businesses work out where their time is best spent online through my consulting work. Hashtags are a small, useful lever. They are not the strategy. Anyone selling you a “secret hashtag list that guarantees viral reach” is selling you something that stopped being true around 2021.
If you run a business where nature or outdoor photography is part of your marketing, whether that is a countryside brand, a tourism operator, or a farm shop with a lovely backdrop, and you want proper help working out how AI tools fit into content planning and where your time is best spent, that is exactly the kind of thing I cover with clients through my AI consultant for small business work.
Frequently asked questions
Should I put hashtags in the caption or the first comment?
Instagram reads them the same way for reach purposes, so it makes no real difference to the algorithm. Put them in the caption if you want a cleaner look and less chance of forgetting them, or in the first comment if you want the caption itself to look uncluttered on first glance.
Do hashtags still matter on Instagram in 2026?
They matter less than they did five years ago and more than zero. A small, well-matched set of 8 to 12 hashtags across broad, niche, location, and community categories still brings in real new followers, particularly for location tags, but caption quality, alt text, and reels now do more of the work than hashtags alone.
What is the ideal number of hashtags for a nature photography post?
Between 8 and 12 works best in my experience across my own account and several client accounts. Using all 30 that Instagram allows tends to read as spam and can drag down reach rather than boost it, because engagement quality drops when the caption is buried under tags.
Which hashtags should I avoid for nature and wildlife photography?
Avoid oversaturated tags like #nature and #photography where posts are over 500 million, engagement-bait tags like #like4like or #f4f, and check periodically whether your usual wildlife tags have been restricted, since poaching and animal cruelty reports sometimes get tags flagged even when your own content has nothing to do with it.
Related reading: Legitimate Work From Home Jobs That Pay Weekly: The Real List, Real Numbers, and What Most Articles Won’t Tell You and List of top quality blogs that accept guest posts (450+).
