I probably follow a good 150 people and groups on Flickr and when I see a photo I like a lot I mark is as a “favourite”. I’ve now got 431 flagged as such and I was wondering, as I entered another into the pile, what the hell I would ever do with this collection. Sure, it’s nice to flick through them once in a while (and the act of favouriting does serve as a silent “I like this photo” comment) but on the whole they just sit there.
Some people post photos they like on their blogs but I’ve never felt comfortable doing that. That said, my favourites page is a blog of sorts – a record of the photos on Flickr I’ve found to be notable – so it makes sense to share that.
Here’s the thumbnails. There are 12 pages of them at the moment.
Here’s the slideshow, probably the best way to view them.
Remember, these were added in an arbitrary manner, my reasons for doing so are not given and juxtapositions may be odd, but that’s a good thing.
And no cod-psychoanalysis please.
You have an appreciation of the beauty of decay, maybe thats why I like you Pete :)
I only have 67! I don’t think that’s because I am more discerning, by the way, but because I simply forget to “fav” the photos I like. It’s a great way to look back on photos that you probably viewed for a second or two several months ago and i must start to do it more often. Thanks for the wake up call!
Hmmm, might be interesting to print a few maybe? Or maybe print the entire collection in thumbnails…
Whilst I use Flickr I don’t spend that much time IN Flickr. A quick, weekly or so, surf of “interestingness” and contact’s photos is about my limit.
I didn’t favourite stuff for quite a while but with my current system it makes sense to do so.
I have the feeds set up in NewNewsWire (a seperate RSS reader app) which I click through. When one of the thumbnails looks interesting I open the Flickr page in the browser for a full size look, and if it’s still good I mark it as a Fave, but only if I really like it. The fact that it’s public (if slightly obscured) does mean I have to think about it before I Fave so it’s a little more than a bookmarking thing.
So that’s what “interestingness” is for! It’s the one aspect of Flickr that has had me bewildered.
Interestingness is really just Google PageRank for photos. It’s a ranking based on the number of comments, faves, which groups the photo is in and so on but also weighted by who is doing the commenting, etc and what their interestingness is and a bunch of other things. In effect it serves to automatically filter out all the crud and just present the good shit.
Compare: recent photos tagged “dog” vs interesting photos tagged “dog”.