More Fun Ways to Explore Flickr

You know, I was just overjoyed to discover that Flickr has several new avenues of exploration. Because you know, I have tons of free time. I just want to jump up and do a happy dance when I discover that there's a new timesink out there screaming my name.

Feh.

But I kid Flickr. Flickr offers all kinds of new browsing options, all of which you can start from http://www.flickr.com/explore .

First one is the view by month. Pick a month (August 2004 to August 2005) and you'll get a calendar filled with pictures. Click on a picture and you'll get thumbnails of the most interesting pictures of the day. These vary from painfully cute to weird to artistic to whatever.

To many days at a time for you? Then choose the Year Ago Today option to see the most interesting photos from a single day. The single-day URL is http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/2004/08/03/ today; I found I was able to edit it to days within the past year.

This page also includes pointers to interesting sets of photographs and interesting groups dedicated to certain topics and photographs. But the most interesting thing was the new clustering feature.

If you've been around search engines any amount of time you're probably familiar with the concept of clustering -- gathering relevant/related search terms into groups, which makes it easier to browse/expand a search. Flickr offers this concept with photographs and the tags used to describe them. The URL structure looks like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/bird/clusters/

Simply replace the word bird with whatever tag you're interested in. You'll get several groups of related keywords along with thumbnails that are related to that cluster.

You can keep going with that URL. Simply add another keyword to the end of the URL:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/bird/clusters/green

That'll take you to a single large set of photographs with pointers to a few other clusters.

You can read more about these new offerings over at the Flickr blog and briefly at Yahoo Search Blog.

Posted to Aesthetics-Art-Photography | TrackBack