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The Life in a Day of Explore: Feb 7, 2008

February 13th, 2008

I get a lot of questions from people asking why their photos move around in Flickr’s Explore. I’ve written an FAQ but I thought a visual explanation might be better. This video represents a single day of Explore, February 7th, 2008.

More information and credits below…

How it was made

To create this video, Explore was monitored for 96 hours by sampling the data every 5 minutes and checking for changes. A collage of all 500 photos was created each time Explore changed (blank squares in the video are deleted photos). Even though Explore only shows 500 photos per day at once, there were actually around 2,000 photos in Explore on February 7th as of this writing. That was just one day. And it is still changing.

Click here to find your own Flickr photos in Explore.

Credits

I’ve tried to give credit to all photographers shown. However, some of the photographs shown in the video have been made private or deleted (or in some cases the photographer has quit Flickr altogether). In those cases, I simply link to the photographer’s photo stream. If you like these photographs, please visit the Flickr streams of the photographers and let them know.

World’s best photo sharing by Flickr.

The collages and all 1,600 interpolated frames were created with ImageMagick. Movie created with ffmpeg.

Music by DNA and vocals by Musetta.

Photos in order of appearance (all photographs are copyrighted by their respective owners):

9 Responses to “The Life in a Day of Explore: Feb 7, 2008”

  1. Jan(sylkyred1) says:
    February 15, 2008 at 11:14 am

    Thank you so much for showing this to all of us!! I know that some of my Explore pictures have been dropped, then reappear, drop again,etc. You have spent a great deal of time researching this and I know that I, along with thousands of others, are thankful!!

    Whew….what a lot of work you have done. Congrats!

    Reply
  2. YT says:
    February 15, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    I’ve never been able to figure out Explore. But thanks for this snapshot.

    Reply
  3. Jodi says:
    February 19, 2008 at 8:37 pm

    Great example.

    Thanks for all your hard work!

    Reply
  4. magneticwun says:
    February 20, 2008 at 2:20 pm

    it’s amazing.

    I LOVE how you worked hard to show us how this flickr Explore thing works!!
    you are all to be commended on your efforts, much appreciated!

    thank you!!!

    Reply
  5. Joe Howell says:
    February 20, 2008 at 3:34 pm

    Thanks a ton for putting that together – I’ve long been mystified by how Flickr chooses “interesting” photos. It’s never the ones I like the best that seem to make the cut. I squinted really hard to try and catch my shot in there, but it must have whizzed by me.

    Reply
  6. Perla* says:
    February 21, 2008 at 10:43 pm

    WOW!!!
    Cool! Finally we have an explanation for how EXPLORE works!
    Thanks a lot for going through all this trouble to let us know about it.
    I’m goins to post a ling on my groups leading here because I’m sure a lot of people will enjoying finally getting this information about EXPLORE.
    Once again, thanks you very much!
    Cheers,
    Perla

    Reply
  7. gogourrecetle says:
    December 19, 2008 at 8:16 pm

    good resourse Anyway by sight very much it is pleasant to me

    Reply
  8. Ớt says:
    July 13, 2009 at 11:23 am

    oops… so amazing!

    Reply
  9. Jon Eland says:
    July 27, 2009 at 3:24 am

    What an interesting experiment – made better by the fact one of my photos appears! (Thanks for the credit)

    Reply

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