Alex P. › Likes

Ole, I hadn't heard that certain groups penalized photos but have seen Flickr staff in the past mention that posting your photo to too many groups will reduce it's visibility with their algorithm. - Thomas Hawk

Good point on EXIF data Ole, yes, photos in Explore are required to have EXIF data. My own guess as to why this is is that if a photo has EXIF data it is more likely to be your own photo vs. something you simply ripped from the web. Not foolproof of course but I'd guess that this policy is in part due to a desire to increase the authenticity of the photos promoted on Explore. - Thomas Hawk

If you look at the photos in Explore, the only "Leave a comment" groups that I see with any regularity are TWTME and 1-2-3 groups... what makes them special I'm not sure, other than they're amongst the largest groups in general. But you see very few of those award groups or "leave x comments" groups in the photos in Explore, so I suspect that Flickr must be penalizing them. - Eric P

Thomas, that's a great refresher on the original article. Some great tips. - Tom Quinn

And Thomas, throwing reciprocation in as a "bonus"? It should have been #1 or #2. The vast, vast, vast majority of comments and faves that I receive are from people whose stream I previously visited. The only real exception to that is when a photo is high in Explore, which results in a torrent of views/comments/faves from strangers. - Eric P

Yep Eric. Reciprocation is very high. Bonus tip might not be the best place for it. It's very important. Faving back when people fave your work, commenting back. Adding people back as mutual contacts, etc. All encourage activity on your photostream. - Thomas Hawk

Eric, participation groups don't penalize your photo from Explore best I can tell. This photo http://www.flickr.com/photos... from a few weeks ago was in the Deleteme Uncensored critique group and was #3 on Explore as well. - Thomas Hawk

In fact just searching flickr for the save10 tag from the DMU critique group along with "explore" brings up a number of photos: http://www.flickr.com/search... - Thomas Hawk

Good post, *IF* getting attention is important to you, as opposed to using it as a vehicle to just share photos with people - Eric Rice

After I read your original article on Flickr popularity a while back, I began reciprocating every comment received. That worked very well. - Tom Harrison

Eric, true. Some people have no interest in their photos receiving attention. I do think that the majority of people posting on Flickr though do appreciate when their photos receive some attention. Lots of people do not though. I have friends that only publish private photos that their friends can see and opt out of every public aspect of Flickr. I think these people though are the exception rather than the norm and think that Caterina's quote is pretty typical of the most active users on the site. - Thomas Hawk

Thanks for digging my article Aaron! :) http://digg.com/arts_cu... - Thomas Hawk

interesting Ole. I hadn't seen that. I think it would be difficult for Flickr to manually track every group that encourages tags and comments as participation. Per the links above though, photos in DMU have definitely made it into Explore anyways. - Thomas Hawk

Here is an example of tagging. I did not know this woman was a celebrity until after got this shot. It appears on the first page of the image search engines and it has received over 12,000 views. http://flickr.com/photos... - Russellreno

So far I got 3 (!) photos into explore. Their common factor? They all were faved by you (TH) soon after I posted theim. - Guillaume Lemoine

Flickr used to say "who" faves your shots was a part of the Explore algorithm. It wouldn't surprise me if the algorithm weights faves by different people from the Flickr community differently. For instance, Pro accounts where people actually have paid for the service might be weighted higher than non-Pro accounts. More active users might carry more weight with their faves then less active users. Just speculating on this part. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas - I don't think that participation in all groups gets a penalty, just that there are some groups that are penalized as far as Explore is concerned. I simply don't see Explore photos in "Post 1, Comment X" groups - so either there's no explore-worthy photos in those groups (not likely IMHO), or Flickr is penalizing the photos in those groups. - Eric P

such a great post Thomas, thanks for writing it - Dobromir Hadzhiev

As a note to certain groups penalizing your photos...I had a photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos...) that went to explore spot 150 or so. After, I added it to a few groups to see if I could bump it higher. It had the opposite affect and immediately dropped off. I can't say which group exactly did it or if it was the number of groups I submitted to, but adding to groups definitely does come with some sort of penalty. - Justin Korn

If you use FeedBurner, you can splice your Flickr photos into your blog feed. I have it splice my last two photos and I find those have at least 5x the number of views as the ones that aren't in my spliced feed. - Mike Hussein Cohen

Awesome post Thomas. I signed up for Flickr a couple of years ago, but only started using it more regularly after the purchase of a digital SLR camera - so this post is particularly relevant to me. I am still patiently waiting for that first comment/favourite on one of my photos to truly experience the emotions as described by Caterina Fake. - Jeff Smith

Thanks for this post, Thomas. Great tips! - Eric Johnson

Great article Thomas... I was also wondering about what my friend calls 'Shooting for the 75'. That is, a great majority of people only ever see a 75 x 75px thumbnail of your photo. When he processes, he always does a square crop to test how it looks in the frame. Would you like to see proportional thumbnails as an option? - Johnny

I actually really like the square thumbnails. Heck I really like the square crop period. I think I'm cropping more and more of my photos 4x4 these days. Maybe it's just that I've always loved medium format photography so much, not sure why I'm so drawn to the square crop right now though. I much prefer Flickr's square thumbnails actually. Still would love to see larger sizes on FF like SmugMug's thumbnails. - Thomas Hawk

you're right though. Frequently it's the thumbnail that draws people into a photo. A good looking thumbnail is more likely to be selected by viewers for clicking through to full size viewing, commenting, faving, etc. - Thomas Hawk

One of my very first Flickr experiences was someone in a critique group cutting me down for a square crop. It was a rose in a perfect spiral petal pattern, could only be cropped square as far as I was concerned. LOL...I didn't change it either. - Karoli

Haha, that's funny Karoli. so much of the criticism in critique groups on Flickr is so lame. You should have seen the deleteme critique group ravage a Henry Cartier Bresson photograph who is probably considered by most photo historians as the greatest photographer who ever lived. Read some of these comments on this photo for a laugh: http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Thomas Hawk

I used to work to get photos into explore. I think I probably take better pictures now, but I don't have the time at the moment to put in the work. Lots of community building and commenting went into the mix. I confess, there's a real rush to hitting the front page. I had three in the top 10, and it was a lot of fun. - Karoli

I have been doing a lot of panoramic shots over the past year and I have started to play around with vertical cropping. Taking a portrait photo and cropping a really tight vertical crop: http://www.flickr.com/photos... It's all about how the picture looks to you in the end. Square, circle or hexagon, it's about the sensory reaction :) (and now I'm going to square crop for this week just to try it out, thanks guys) - Johnny

Thomas, those comments are a hoot! I met some nice people in some of the critique groups, but it didn't take me long to know the critiques weren't helping. I do love Flickr's community...even if I haven't spent a lot of time in it lately. - Karoli

yeah, the attention from Explore can be fun. But I'm pretty unimpressed with a lot of the photos there. I think Flickr could do a much better job with that algorithm. I do find filtering explore just by my contacts though produces more consistently interesting photographs for me. I use this script to do just that: http://www.drewmyersphoto.net/flickr_... - Thomas Hawk

Agree on the photo quality on Explore. Seems like a lot of the same sort of gimmicky stuff lands there. Looking forward to trying the script. - Karoli

Thanks for the article, that opened my eyes up a lot - Alex Carpenter

Hey Karoli, here's you and your daughter by the way. I uploaded this to Zooomr a while back when I was taking a break from Flickr but uploaded it tonight on Flickr. Great fun on that photowalk. http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Thomas Hawk

Hey, cool! Thanks for the pointer. It was a great photowalk, would love to do another sometime soon! - Karoli

Here is one more way to get attention: Comment on this post with a link to one of your photos. I received a hit today from the comment about. http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Russellreno

aw man I'm a quarter of the way though and am just DYIN' - Marko Bon

"I can't sort by penis!" -- EPIC - Nicholas Kreidberg

"I rebooted three times, like you always tell me to" - Josh Haley

forever a classic - Jim Goldstein from twhirl

I'm sure he'll have something everyone can play with in a few weeks - Kevin Rose

I'm jealous. - Aaron Myers

BTW, where is delicious 2.0? - Nick Humphries

Ahhhhhh DO WANT URL! - Greg Rosen from twhirl

:) - joshua schachter

Is it built on Google App Engine? - Bryan Landers

Didn't he resign from yahoo or something? I guess this is what he left it for.. - Mark

Yes, I left. Yes, it's on App Engine. No, I didn't leave to do this, it is just a toy. - joshua schachter

whoa, I just heard that Apple is working on a headset, that can play music over bluetooth, insane! - Nik Gomez

No fckn way! Awesome! - Scott Wamsley

Apple is working on a Macbook that can play xbox games over fields of cheese? - Simon Wicks

@Cole it's just randomness █ you can highlight and copy! - Joe Dawson

maybe it is "Apple is working on a IPHONE, that can play ANY STATION over WORLDSPACE, insane!" - slax

LOL too funny ... something that resembles government censorship as filtered through the reality distortion field. - Cathy Brooks

@Joe - yeah i was copying/pasting the black boxes into word and notepad to see what the heck it could be. ascii, i was thinking.. - Cole Orton

Mad libs! - Richard Klein

must be that iPhone with two batteries :) - Nathan Henderson

"Apple is working on a WINDOWS BASED IPHONE, that can play DRM FILES over INBUILT WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER, insane!" lol :) - slax

what is going on with twitter and these black rectangles? - edythe

“whoa, I just heard that Apple is working on a whale, that can play tetris over a campfire, insane!” - Jack Smith

Apple is working on a SANDWICH, that can play CHECKERS over THE WEB, insane! This is fun. - Evan Ryan.

whoa, I just heard that Apple is working on a ROBOT that can play HOPSCOTCH over LAVA, insane! - Jason Hellmann

whoa, I just heard that Apple is working on a electric computer, that can play suckers out of their money over and over again, insane! - Paul Reynolds

Apple is working on an IBM-CLONE PC that can play 8-BIT SOUND over AND OVER AND OVER, insane! - Craig Thomler

lame - Paul D. Spradling

Its called the i███ - Nick Humphries

Cool! You can remove the redactions by highlighting the redacted text (█████) and then typing CMD-X! - Richard Klein

Crappy pcs...no cmd button...arg - Saul Mora from twhirl

wow I am glad they are finally fixing the things it doesn't do. now if it could coy and paste it would be almost as good as a blackberry - Jenz

This is like tech mad libs - Adrian

whoa! I just heard Apple is working on a [new design] that can play [a big role in the future of their company] over [there]! - Mark

I thought I had one too many greasemonkey scripts working ;) - Oldengrey (Jay)

@casademora, don't sweat it (no cmd key) - I made it up. - Richard Klein

Oooh. Mad Libs. Fun! - Jenny

What is this shit anyway Kevin? - ricardo giesta

Kevin are you Censoring yourself? Why the blacked out words? - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Probably because he █████ the █████ after the █████. - Ken Sheppardson

It was mostly a joke :) - Kevin Rose

-_ - Dru Kelly

lol! - Shivanand Velmurugan from twhirl

Until they get so used to seeing the dollar that they don't look anymore and then trip on conduit..... ;P - Jeff P. Henderson

What are you going to be in Seattle for? Is it an open lunch? - John OBrien

Robert, just curious... why post a duplicate link when there's already a conversation in the published flickr photo thread? http://friendfeed.com/e... - Alan Le

Thanks for getting the stickers! - Erica Toelle

Alan: when I posted this there wasn't a conversation there. They both took off at the same time. - Robert Scoble

When people get used to seeing the dollar bill, they'll have to upgrade to a $5 bill. This could get expensive! - Morton Fox

What lunch tomorrow? Can anyone go? - Ryan Stewart

Ryan: you really need to subscribe to my Upcoming.org page: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/user... It's the FriendFeed lunch and, yes, anyone can go. - Robert Scoble

Wipeout (a Chevy's sister restaurant) has $5 bills stuck to the floors underneath the bar stools, so you can laugh at all the drunks trying to scrape them up. ;) - Kevin Hessel

Jeeeze, I guess so. Subscribed. - Ryan Stewart

I thought this said "Why is a three dollar bill taped to the floor..." and thought Robert was making homophobic insinuations about the FF team. - Dan MacTough from Alert Thingy

Total revenue to date? - Geoff

@Sonciary Honnoll the office would need to set up a new budget, floor tripping budget maybe? - Chris Harris

thank you Shawn! We're trying hard - Loic Le Meur

Nice work. Now I just need to get used to posting videos onto Seesmic... :P - Chris Thomson

I liked it :) You actually can reply from just anywhere where HTML (and flash) are supported ;-) - directeur from NoiseRiver

still can't view seesmic on iPhone. Grr. Yeah I know its kind of not your fault. - David Jacobs

Man, I am getting my new webcam tomorrow or the next day, I am so looking forward to playing with it on seesmic. - Phil Glockner

David, we're working hard on iPhone. Not easy though as it does not really support video.... - Loic Le Meur

Now we need replies in Twhirl. I know. I know. Never enough for use, is it. :) - Douglas E. Welch from twhirl

...for us...that is - Douglas E. Welch from twhirl

oh now -that- is slick - Jay Cuthrell

Unfortunately on Firefox that Ubuntu installs, Flash used by Seesmic is making Firefox crash. - Danilo da Silva from twhirl

Cool. That's a great set of features. - BISQ from twhirl

Douglas, you can't believe how hard we are working on recording replies in Twhirl. Coming soon for sure. - Loic Le Meur

sweeeeeeeeet - justine

Loic, what is with the iPhone of all things not supporting video? I heard that video on a jailbroken iphone isn't really that hard though. - Phil Glockner

Nice! - fbrunel

J. Phil, okay, then it is me not understanding you can do video easily on an iphone and my team not having the bandwidth to do this yet, thanks for the fact checking - Loic Le Meur

Loic, I think you mis-understood me. I don't know. I don't have an iphone yet. I just heard that video can be done on an iphone, which makes me wonder why apple hasn't done it 'officially' yet. - Phil Glockner

thanks J. Phil got it. - Loic Le Meur from twhirl

Research for Loic: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets... - Phil Glockner

Sweet. - Kevin Bondelli

Brian, we had sent the code to our Friendfeed friends and they decided to push it on sunday. I like it ;) - Loic Le Meur

Which way do I go? Right or Left! LOL Just joking! Very useful! - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

this will be awesome if it doesnt show in the seesmic main timeline - adolfo foronda

adolfo right now it does show in the public timeline, we're taking that off in the next hours - Loic Le Meur from twhirl

Nice one Loic. Keep up the great work. You're doing a great job listening to your community. It's all about integration. - Larry Kless

Loic. congratulations. The new player is great! Really a big step forward usability-wise. Question: if someone adds a video reply, does friendfeed get notified about the addition to that the post get's back on top of the friendfeed timeline. It would be nice if it did: bringing active conversations back on top is one of the nicest friendfeed features. Kudos again. Funding -> stability -> features = nice momentum! - Edwin Khodabakchian

Loic, do we still have to pay 5 Euros for Cappuccino in Paris or do we get a discount if we tell them we know you? lol - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Congratulations on this new development; Happy that Seesmic continues to grow and integrate with other socnets! : ) - Susan Beebe

It doesn't work with Posterous now. Is this because of seesmic's update? - Shinya ICHINOHE

What are the chance of gettig that function in Twirl? - Bart Mroz from twhirl

good stuff! - sean808080 from twhirl

Heh -- finally Seesmic works inline in IE7 -- can now unhide Seesmic posts (that doesn't mean I will view them but at least the option is there ;-) ) - Brian Sullivan

Nice feature - Christian Van Der Henst

Edwin, yes, if you add your seesmic account to Friendfeed (like you do for all services) then you do a reply (or any new video) it will post it in your Friendfeed feed. - Loic Le Meur

Is nice. I like. - Steve Garfield

SSEEEESSMIC... takes off. Awesome. Awesome... ;-) - Barbara K. Baker

The Seesmic Integration with FF is pretty cool! Hats off Loic.= - Marshall Sponder

The added perspective of seeing them side-by-side is nice. I wonder where the moon is in it's orbit (does this accurately show the distance between the two)? - Paul Buchheit

Given the description of Earth's distance from Mars, I'd say this is head-on, meaning this is to scale: "At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels." - Mark Trapp

I take that back, that would make the moon way too close to the Earth. - Mark Trapp

That's an awesome pic - Sally Church