How to get your photos into Flickr Explore

I had a lot of my recent photos in Flickr Explore selection, and I got questions how I got them there. It really hard to answer, as Flickr tells you nothing about how they choose the photos. It’s mostly quite a surprise when a photo gets there. But here are a few tips, which when I started following, I got more photos into explore.

• Take good photos. The more views, comments and faves you get, the sooner you get explored. Also if the photo looks interesting as a small thumbnail, the more hits you get.
• Share links to your photos on other sites, as Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and similar.
• Forget about Flickr groups. There is a penalty for adding your photo to a group. I never had a single explored photo, while I added them to a group.
• Add a single photo a day. Only one of you photos can be explored and you are maximizing you chance by adding only one.
• Add your photo in the morning. I usually do that at 10AM my local time (central Europe) which is sometime very early morning in US.
• Tag your photos with relevant tags. This will maximize you change getting views from searches.
• Geo-tag your photos. Again, this will help you get views.
• Be active on Flickr. Don’t hesitate to comment and fave other people photos. I already have few thousand favorites.
• Add a description to your photo. No description will make you look lazy, too much description and nobody will read it. Few lines is enough. The more interesting description, the more comments you will get.

This may help you, but may not. It will just make your changes greater. What helps the most is having a lot of Flickr contacts, as your photo will show up to them when they visit Flickr.

You can also check if your photos got explored here http://bighugelabs.com/scout.php or here http://lab.bernatcasero.com/?lang=en

Best luck to you all on getting your photos explored :)

Passage

Always when I see arches, I center my photos. I really like the symmetry in such shots :) Another thing what I did here is double tonemapping. It brought out really a lot of detail in the walls. I took this photo last week, while taking a little photo walk in Bratislava Old town.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.