Flickr explore - how does it work?

[2slo]

As per the title really, does anyone know how the explore shots get chosen? I often look through the daily choices, some of which are undoubtedly excellent images, others however seem to be low quality snaps with little or no thought having gone into them.
Other than trawling through the list or getting comments and favourites from people you don't know, there's no notification that one of your photos has been chosen to be on explore. There is a search engine to find out if you've had any/ how many featured which is http://bighugelabs.com/scout.php?. Still doesn't explain how explore works though

[MartinP]

Flickr assigns an 'interesting' rating to all of the images and Explore is the directory of the most interesting images. As the interesting rating is just worked out by an algorithm, it doesn't take into account whether most people would think the image was any good or not. To calculate the rating it uses the number of views, comments and favourites. It also takes into account which and how many groups the image is in.

If you know how to play the game it's possible to increase the chances of getting onto explore, but I don't really see the point...

[2slo]

Thanks. I'm not interested in trying to get images featured, just curious as to how it worked. The maths behind the algorithm is probably beyond me so I'll not worry about it

[RobbieKB]

Quick thread revival. Does anyone know how to check the origins of views on an image if you don't have a pro account?

I cancelled my pro account and, as is the way, one of my images got 15,000 views in 1 week, which is very high for me. I would like to see how. I tried Google image search but that failed.

[paul911]

Think this is the only way to see what’s been in explore Rob, otherwise it’s the stats that you no longer have

http://bighugelabs.com/dna.php?username=RobbieB88

[markmullen]

The Explore Finder, also at Big Huge Labs shows yours

http://bighugelabs.com/scout.php?username=RobbieB8...

[RobbieKB]

Yeah that's the site I use too, but I can't find where the unexpected 15,000 views have come from!

My photo that made Flickr front page and explore #2 has 4100 views. This photo has nearly 4 times that!