How I Pick The Photos

Someone sent me an email this morning asking how I pick the photos featured here. It’s a perfectly reasonable question, so I figured I’d explain.

I’ve got a private website running on my home web server that is powered by a bunch of software I wrote. That software hits the Flickr site and digs for photos that are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license for a given day and that have a high likelihood of being good.

That process presents me with a list of 500 or so really decent photos and another 300-400 that are tossed out right away. I review that page of thumbnails for those that jump out at me in some way and save those to a “holding pen” of sorts. I deliberately skip any photos that have a high likelihood of getting someone in trouble for all of the posts so far. The category “Worksafe” on this site embodies that. I can see a time when a “NotWorksafe” category is added that would be exactly that, but not now.

Anyway, I then go through that holding pen and review those. There’s usually 15-20 or so. So, I whittle it down to the 10 I like the best and post those. That’s pretty much it.

Because the software powering that site is pretty intense, I’m not opening it up for public use at this point. However, if you’d like to be a contributor to this site (and post your own picks), you can let me know and I’ll get you access to that photo engine.

Posted by J Wynia March 2008

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