Flickr Updates Its Explore Algorithm

Sample photos selected for Flickr’s Explore

Explore is Flickr’s automated attempt to show you “the most awesome photos on Flickr.” Explore showcases 500 photos per day, said to be about 0.005% of the daily upload volume. Ages ago in dog years and Internet time, Flickr was the place for photographers to be, and that daily Explore featuring of 500 photos was the way to get more visibility for your photos. Google Search indexed your Flickr photo URLs, and strong Flickr community response in comments, likes and so on seemed to increase the Google Search ranking for your work. Flickr stats showed about 30% of my image views were coming from Google Search, so spending time on Flickr was a definitely a productive way to get more visibility for my emerging photography business.

Many photographers tried to reverse engineer and game the system to try to get their images included. Images could pop into then out of Explore, so it wasn’t always easy to tell if your photo was temporarily included, or well down in that daily Explore selection, unless someone posted a “Congrats on Explore” comment under your image.

As photographers drifted off to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the Explore algorithm evolved, and it would seem to go through phases of highlighting various esoteric niches: mobile phone shots, foreign celebrities, and apparently (as they describe it) yellow school buses. Like a person seeking to be popular by emulating someone other than themselves, Flickr Explore as a poor impersonation of Instagram (or anything else) was just as much a misguided exercise as Google Plus was.

I had identified about 200 of the images of mine that had passed through the Explore showcase over time, but I eventually found it so uninteresting, I stopped looking. It seemed like I rarely got photos in, but more importantly, the ones included were things like iPhone test shots, condition documentation, they weren’t necessarily the photos I would show someone anyway. Some were high resolution originals, which I had no interest in exposing to theft. As Explore became less relevant to me, I stopped caring. But worse, my time spent on Flickr became less productive.

Flickr was still useful as the most full-featured place for my photographs, with tagging, albums, hosting images for embedding in my blog, and some exposure to its remaining community, but Explore was less relevant, and as users migrated to other services, Google search traffic seemed to dry up.

Fortunately for everyone, the Explore algorithm has been recently updated by the SmugMug-Flickr team:

We’re completely migrated. We’ve received support from our awesome Pros. We’re in a great position to dig in and tackle some updates. First up? Testing to update Explore. 📷https://t.co/XVKek56GKB

— Flickr (@Flickr) March 19, 2020

I found this out by accident, as a new image upload of mine made it into Explore (and someone commented):

My latest image selected for Flickr’s Explore

I went to the third party tool that tracks which photos have been in Explore, and I found that over 330 of my photos have been selected for explore., including 50 more since I had stopped looking. (To find your own photos featured in Explore, substitute your screen name or Flickr ID number at that link.)

Some interesting observations… Some of my better, older work was recently featured. That’s a good thing! I often re-process my older images, and Flickr enables me to replace the photo (one of my favorite Flickr features). Given the complicated algorithm, changing anything such as adding your photo to a group or adding a tag can kick your photo in or out of Explore. So if you replace a photo and maybe accept a group invitation you missed or put it in a group, it may get more activity, and Flickr may detect recognize the improvements. Or maybe a human does. Either way, continuing to invest in Flickr, even with older images, can deliver new benefits. Since I like and want to keep using Flickr, anything that improves it and encourages new use is a good thing.

Does this signal a new era of relevance and quality for Explore? Time will tell. I hope so. Is there anything we can do to get images included? I hope not. It was always rumored to be a collection of algorithms mixed with some human selection or curation. Given the range of photography genres, and of human personalities creating images and looking for them, hopefully there’s as much variety as possible and as little inherent bias as possible. The only advice I’d give is that if you discover an image included, maybe wait at least 7 days to modify its groups so it doesn’t get kicked out of the “Explore/Last 7 Days Interesting” set.

Best wishes on having your images selected. Feel free to give your observations and thoughts on Flickr and Explore below.

Special note in these trying times:
Many of these images are available as prints through my portfolio site at https://jeffsullivan.smugmug.com/. Print sales are extremely slow in this economy, so I only take the time to complete final edits for new images after I have a specific request. Let me know if there are any specific images that you’d like me to add for printing. Take care of yourself, and consider supporting your favorite artists and authors to whatever extent you’re able.