I see that a lot of great photographers post their work on Flickr. What’s the best way to find good photographs for use a desktop wallpaper?
I must say that you are on the right trail, because Flickr is indeed full of fantastic photographers. The problem is that there are also many other people posting photos on Flickr, and these photos are more of the snapshot variety. What’s more, these types of users tend to bulk-upload many similar photos from the same event at one time. This makes it easy for those people to share their snapshots with their friends, but if you’re not searching Flickr in the most most efficient way, their snapshots end up consuming page after page after page of your search results.
The solution to finding good desktop wallpaper on Flickr is to order your search results according to interestingness, instead of the date they were uploaded. “Interestingness” is a term Flickr uses to describe the scoring and ranking system they use to highlight photos that stand out from the crowd. The exact details of how interestingness is computed are a Flickr secret, but we can infer that the interestingness of a photo has to do with how many times it has been viewed, how many comments it has received, and how many people have marked it as a favorite. Flickr combines these, and probably many other factors, to compute the photo’s interestingness.
By ordering your Flickr search results by interestingness, you’ll see some of the most popular photos related to your search terms instead of the most recently uploaded ones. Ordering your Flickr wallpaper search by interestingness is drop-dead simple:
- Go to Flickr.com and types some keywords into the search box.
- On the search results page, locate the line that says “We found xxxxxx results for photos matching
“. - The very next line should read “View: most relevant - most recent - most interesting”. Click on “most interesting”.
Your Flickr search results will now be presented to you in order of their interestingness, and you should see some fantastic, desktop wallpaper-quality photos. Click on the photo you want, and if the photographer (or Flickr) has allowed you to download high-quality versions, you’ll see a light gray “all sizes” button above the photo. Click that button to get a larger, desktop wallpaper-sized version of the photo.
By the way, if you like a photographer’s work enough to look at it every day on your computer’s desktop, you should drop the photographer a line to let them know how much you appreciate it! Leave a comment on their photo stream, or send them some Flickr mail.
