Chinese Door, Floor and Cupboard
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

According to flickr’s internal, proprietary, algorithm for evaluating pictures in order to rate how interesting they are, this is my most interesting pic. I find this a little hard to believe.

To explain, this photo is part of a set of maybe 150 photos, which I took of my bedroom/livingroom in China, in order to plug them into a Microsoft labs tool called Photosynth, which creates these 3D environments from photos. Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows needed to see the end product here.

Before this high status happened, I guessed that a few factors applied, for example: number of views, number of people who add the photo as a favorite and who they actually are, tags and their relative “interestingness” score, location via geo-tagging, number of comments and who wrote them, some estimate based on click through from linked sites and web search, number of notes and who created them, title words etc. But compared to my other pictures, this had no comments, I hadn’t given it a title (still the photo filename as from the camera), the tags were nothing special (apart from maybe “Synth Test”) and to be frank the content isn’t that special.

I’m guessing there maybe some analysis of the picture going on (either directly or through histogram analysis of colour frequency) and a trending tag relating to the synth test. It just frustrates me a little to find such an uninteresting photo, as being given this number 1 most interesting photo status. It renders my other photos status in the algorithm very poorly, unless it’s some sort of anomaly.