Search

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Flickr Explore – some interestingness thoughts on how to get your photos to explore page

Flickr uses an algorithm  to choose the best 500 photos every day and these photos are posted on post them on Flickr Explore page. This algorithm goes by the name “interestingness”.

according to flickr - "There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr."

1) The easiest (most obvious) way to get into flickr explore is to shoot an excellent photo. or at least one that others think is interesting to them.

2) Getting more people to comment or tag the picture as favorite will really help.

3) to get more people to comment on your photos may take a while especially if you are starting off with flickr, but you can speed up this by adding your best photos first.

4) actively participate in forums(groups), discussions get people to discuss on you photos.

5) personally i dont like the comments that embed pictures in them… but you will find a lot of them in several groups. its something you have to live with if you are really interested in getting comments.

6) Get a bunch of flickr folks to regularly visit your photos by giving positive remarks and marking their photos are favorites. Its easier If you have a bunch of friends who are actively in flickr, otherwise try inviting them. All this would improve your chances of getting to explore.

Unfortunately flickr does not notify you in any way  if your photos are featured in explore (other than the attention it suddenly gets). To check if your photos are on explore, you can goto the free service http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/dna.php?username=77469973@N00    You just need to replace the username with yours and you can see a lot of statistics on you flickr account, including the list of photos that were featured in explore.

So far only 6 of my images have been in Explore and the highest position ever taken is # 34 (i still hold that). Below is a slide show of those images.

Some more links worth a click.

No comments: