Are you familiar with the "Explore" section of Flickr? Every day 500 photos are chosen to be included in this gallery. My friend, Deborah, had a photo chosen a couple of days ago. She noticed that she had an exciting amount of views (at last count, 5500+ views!) of her very
beautiful quilt made with Denyse Schmidt's Shelburne Falls fabric. It is most definitely very "view" worthy, and I suspected that it had been chosen for the Explore gallery as well.
You don't get notified by anyone if your photo is chosen, and I usually forget about that gallery. Sometimes some kind person will email you that you have had a photo included. That happened to me once when
Lynne let me know that a picture of my "pop beads" had been included.
So I did a bit of sleuthing today. Like how are pictures chosen in the first place? And how do you know your picture has been chosen unless you consistently scroll through the gallery each and every day?
I found some interesting information
here, as well as suggestions how to increase your chances.
Here are the basic stats:
Flickr receives about 6,000 uploads every minute -- That's about 8.6 million photos a day! From this huge group of
images, the Flickr Interestingness algorithm chooses only 500 images to showcase for each 24-hour period. That's only one image in every 17,000!
Isn't that crazy??
How to find out if your photo was Explored by Flickr: Big Huge Labs has a web-based app for that, called
"Scout": bighugelabs.com/scout.php
So I went to Big Huge Labs and typed in the info. Look what I found!
Four of my pictures have been included in Explore over the years--and I didn't even know it other than the one on the far right. The cool thing is that they will make this little banner for you and you can save it as a jpeg.
There are also some pointers on increasing your chances, such as making sure that the last picture you upload is your very best picture of the day. Fascinating, huh?
I saw our son,
the optometrist, the other day. Routine eye exam. One of my eyes has been really dry so he put temporary plugs in my tear ducts. Sounds unpleasant--didn't hurt even a little bit. My eyes DO feel a lot better so maybe the next step is permanent plugs.
Our daughter-in-law, Christa, is taking an online photography course. She came over the other day to take pictures in my sewing room. I'm anxious to see what she came up with. However, she did share one that she took of me--the best picture of me taken by anyone. Ever. It is now my new profile picture. She also took pictures of Marcelle Goes to the Circus, which will be debuting at Bloggers Quilt Festival tomorrow.
(disclosure: this is NOT one of Christa's pictures....)
At Target the other day, I made two discoveries. I'm not sure I think this is a good idea. I love fabric, but I'm not sure I want a fuzzy "fabric effect" on my fingernails.
This, however, is a GREAT idea. Orla Keily has such great designs. I think I want that orange one for a portable sewing kit.
I got a set of the cutest Star Wars finger puppets
here. I bought the entire set and I'm not kidding when I say that these are extremely well made, with incredible detail.
Someone is having a really good time with them. Thanks, Julie!
Your turn.