Old Dog Photography

Unless you hang out on Flickr very much, you may not have heard about Explore. Basically, Flickr has a top-secret algorithm that determines the “Interestingness” of photos uploaded to the site — and Explore is a part of the site that shows the 500 “most interesting” photos at any given time. There seem to be a number of opinions on the subject of just how “Interestingness” is calculated, but the amount of activity surrounding a picture seems to be a major part of the equation.

So getting a picture into Explore isn’t necessarily a statement on the image’s value, more one on how well-networked the image’s contributor is. Still, getting an image into Explore helps get it (and by extension, its photographer) more visibility — which brings more traffic.

Using a cool tool called Scout, I found that I’ve now had four of my images in Explore. Obviously, this is small-potatoes compared to the more-established photographers that have had dozens (or hundreds!) of images there, but I’m happy with my four.

At least, for now…