photo 26 Mar 2007 04:11 pm
Popularity, Flickr Style
Popularity is an odd thing. It’s not something I’m used to and certainly something that I don’t fully understand. I’m talking, of course, about picture popularity. Flickr has been my photo outlet and feedback ground as of late. It’s got its ins and outs, ups and downs, but I generally like it. Yes, I get sick of going on to forums and seeing the same question for the thousandth time (”WHAT LENS SHOULD I GET?!?!”), but there are a lot of talented people and a lot of really nice people there. It has provided the positive feedback I needed to push myself when I was starting up my photo habit again.
It’s funny what gets really high numbers on Flickr. “What are these numbers of which he speaks?,” you might be asking yourself if you are not a flickr user. The numbers are: views, favorites, and comments. Views are how many people have viewed your photo. Favorites are the number of times that a flickr user has marked your photo as a favorite. Comments are the number of comments left by flickr users. Then, out of these numbers and some magic, arises something flickr calls “interestingness“.
In December I went out and shot a lot of misty night shots. Here are two from that night:
I was still sitting on one of the best pictures of the night, though. I just didn’t know how to approach it. In the end, the post work was very minimalist. I worked the curves a little and recovered a little of the red from the lights, but that was pretty much it. I posted it up thinking it would get about the same reaction as the ones posted above.
It didn’t. People like it. It’s got a cool effect, bright colors, motion, and tons of light. It’s number 2 as far as interestingness of my pics goes, it’s number one for comments and number two for favorites. It’s down the list for views, but it’s only been up for a little while. I was pretty surprised.
Here’s a picture I took this weekend of a similar environment (night, fog, lights, etc) but one that gets about the usual reaction:
If you’ll believe me, it’s my best night/fog picture yet.
So why the popularity surge? I think part of it has to do with how people consume flickr photos. The big thing is that most people’s first exposure to any random photo on flickr, one that has been put in pools, is a very small 100px thumbnail, like the ones posted at the beginning of this post. A picture with any amount of detail and subtlety will get lost in a thumbnail that small. Take, for instance, this picture of a bee on a flower:
You can’t see shit at that small. It looks like some blobs of grey of various shades. Woo-hoo! If you look at in a large size, you’ll see the shading and detail in the flower and the bee. It looks great in print. It looks okay large. It looks crappy at even 300 pixels. The other big thing is that, besides being small, the context is important. If you look at pics in a pool of hundreds, your brain is going to filter photos out. The ones with relatively subdued colors aren’t going to pop out at you as much.
I’m not bitter or trying to make excuses or anything, I’m just trying to blab about the idiosyncrasies of flickr as a viewing medium. It has its quirks, but I really like it.