Interestingness

August 14, 2005 10:04 AM

Flickr: Explore! makes it easier to find amazing photographs at Flickr.
posted by nthdegx (37 comments total)

Photos in Explore are arranged by "interestingness".

"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."
posted by nthdegx at 10:05 AM on August 14, 2005

The Flickr team is basically genious. I looked at the rankings of my own photos by 'interestingness' and indeed, what I consider to be my very best shot was ranked #1.
FlickrPro was some of the best money I've ever spent.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 10:27 AM on August 14, 2005

Um... BuddhaInABucket, is your most interesting photo marked private?
posted by birdherder at 10:50 AM on August 14, 2005

gah! I always forget that you can only view the statistics for your own photos, not other people's. Never mind. It was this one, anyway.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 10:57 AM on August 14, 2005

I loves the Flickr.
posted by danb at 11:46 AM on August 14, 2005

beautiful shots there--thanks nth!
posted by amberglow at 11:47 AM on August 14, 2005

Thanks Buddha. I didn't know you could do this with your own photos. Ironically, my "most interesting" is a pic of my wife with Chris Farley. Not sure why but what the hey. However, my best photo is shooting to the top. This is indeed pretty cool.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 11:48 AM on August 14, 2005

My own best, made by rendering in sepia. And this one's climbing fast.
posted by fenriq at 12:46 PM on August 14, 2005

A couple of my favorite imagist on flickr:

counterform
P Villirius
posted by The Jesse Helms at 1:00 PM on August 14, 2005

My most interesting (according to the algorithm) was a lucky moment out the window of my car heading home from a visit to the library one evening. This one, from just the other day, has been climbing fast. I almost didn't post it; I guess that shows how little I know.
posted by mmahaffie at 1:10 PM on August 14, 2005

The most interesting? I guess... :-/
posted by basicchannel at 1:46 PM on August 14, 2005

This one has always been my favourite.
posted by showmethecalvino at 1:56 PM on August 14, 2005

Should go to AskMe, but since Flickr fans will be visiting the thread, a quick question: since the digital image these days is rarely backed with a physical negative anywhere, do you have concerns about ownership, for any photo that you think worthy of either a contest or sale?

I've seen disallowed right-clicks and other schemes to hinder copying, but it's always easy enough to get around. Does Flickr have anything of the kind, or is that even a concern? Why or why not?

(note: I'm not being arrogant -- maybe a quarter of one percent of my photos would I put in that class)
posted by dreamsign at 4:28 PM on August 14, 2005

SHAMELESS LINK TO MY FLICKR PHOTOS (well, if everyone else is...)

I noticed this feature the other day, and sure enough, my most interesting seem to rise to the top also. They are indeed collective genii.
posted by Acey at 4:37 PM on August 14, 2005

This is winning, but I'm pulling from a damn small sample pool.
posted by cortex at 4:50 PM on August 14, 2005

Oops... for non-members it's this one.

Great pics all round! fenriq: Amazing dog pics in there - I know how hard it can be to take such good ones.

Good to hear they plan to update and improve it too. Also: did anyone notice them start putting ads on the sidebar of Flickr?
posted by Acey at 5:03 PM on August 14, 2005

My "most interesting" is not actually a great photo, but clearly benefits from the Kottke Effect.
posted by Tubes at 5:05 PM on August 14, 2005

Dreamsign, Flickr asks you to set privacy. For my shots, I've chosen to go with a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0) which allows re-use, with attribution, for non-commercial purposes.

Of course, if I get lucky and get a shot of some major news event, I probably won't post it to Flickr.
posted by mmahaffie at 5:15 PM on August 14, 2005

My most interesting, also one of my own personal favorites.'

I love flckr.
posted by grey_flap at 5:27 PM on August 14, 2005

My most interesting? Well, the cutest.

Flickr Pro is a delight. I can't wait to actually fill this thing up...
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:30 PM on August 14, 2005

Gah. This.
posted by cortex at 5:32 PM on August 14, 2005

Sticherbeast, great pic.

My most intersting is similarly themed.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 6:12 PM on August 14, 2005

This one is marked as my most interesting, but the folks at DeleteMe didn't seem to like it much!
posted by nprigoda at 6:25 PM on August 14, 2005

but the folks at DeleteMe didn't seem to like it much!

They're a sour bunch. I deleted all the "delete me" comments from mine. That's ironic or something.
posted by grey_flap at 6:29 PM on August 14, 2005

My favorite photos taken by other people. They all have talent and captured great scenes of beauty.
posted by ecco at 6:46 PM on August 14, 2005

Welcome to the interestingness popularity pages.

dreamsign at one point flickr said they would implement transparent images in order to disable drag 'n' drop and right clicks but so far it hasn't happened.
posted by squeak at 7:14 PM on August 14, 2005

posted by muckster at 8:00 PM on August 14, 2005

Thanks for the info. :)
posted by dreamsign at 8:32 PM on August 14, 2005

Wow, this was fun. You guys and gals have some really cool and great photos and pics.
posted by fenriq at 9:49 PM on August 14, 2005

What I find more useful is being able to sort tag outputs by interestingness. Here's metafilter for example.
posted by vacapinta at 12:38 AM on August 15, 2005

Is the algorithm for deciding how "interesting" a photo is described anywhere? How exactly do they do it? Is it like a high-school-esque who-knows-who thing? I'm curious.

Oh, and I might as well add this. Nyeah.
posted by Poagao at 1:14 AM on August 15, 2005

I can see one problem with this algorithm though. It is based on views, notes and comments which results in the most interesting rankings being dominated by heavy social networkers. It also seems to result in a consolidation of that effect. Once you are on the most interesting page you seem to get on it over and over again because more people will view your photostream and comment on it.

It will be harder and harder for people to crack through this popularity wall now that the link for viewing the random incoming photos (the everyone's link) is more difficult to find. My guess is you now HAVE to join the high membership and participation groups to get your pictures noticed.

My most interesting photos are skewed towards the Guess Where in NYC group photos because they comment and note each picture.

My most interesting:
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

So you can see that while the best photos are maybe 3,6,7 those are not the ones that come up as most interesting.

I've also found that I can influence the interestingness ranking of my photos by adding my own notes and comments.
posted by srboisvert at 1:51 AM on August 15, 2005

There's a cool group on Flickr called "Least Interesting" where there have been all sorts of interesting things done with the interestingness tag.

There's a guess-the-tag game which started off really easy, but then got quite beyond me, and is now a bit more reasonable...

It's also quite handy for you to post your own least interesting (most uninteresting?) photo, and have it become more interesting by virtue of having more people view/comment on it...
posted by Chunder at 4:06 AM on August 15, 2005

tag fight
posted by peacay at 9:16 AM on August 15, 2005

Poagao: I think part of the algorithm is taking into account the amount of attention paid to a photo by people with less established connection to the photographer. So if you get a lot of traffic and comments to a photo from your regular crowd composed of contacts and group members and so on, it'll likely be less Interesting than a storm of comments and views from random strangers.
posted by cortex at 11:29 AM on August 15, 2005

Poagao there is a flickr group called "Interestingness" that has been trying to figure it out. It seems to be a combination of tags, comments, fav's (and who fav's it), number of views and groups the image is submitted to. Having a photo with 25 fav's/350 views and 30 comments wont guarantee that your photo will be the cream de la cream of interestingness, I've seen photos with 100+ views no comments and no fav's make it to the top 500 photos for the day.

It will be harder and harder for people to crack through this popularity wall now that the link for viewing the random incoming photos (the everyone's link) is more difficult to find. My guess is you now HAVE to join the high membership and participation groups to get your pictures noticed.

Yup and partly why I think interestingness really really sucks because I don't think it should be about popularity (I personally think this is a social engineering blunder) but I think there is (will be? prays there will be - heh) a bit of a backlash against it.
posted by squeak at 1:15 AM on August 16, 2005

One of my most interesting.
posted by peterbaer at 12:39 PM on August 16, 2005