About:Featured Photos

Introduction

Tired Monk

© blytonrtw

Dotted throughout Travellerspoint are the featured photos of its members. This article intends to explain how these photos are used, how they are featured and what criteria are more or less used in judging photos.

How Featured Photos Are Used

Featured photos are used in a number of ways.

• The most prominent is the front page photo. That photo is one of the last 20 featured photos. It is randomly chosen from these most recent features and will change every time you refresh the page.
• Once a photo has been featured, it will be seen in the featured country gallery. These are heavily linked to throughout the site and from the main photography page.
• In the travel guide, featured photos within articles, particularly country articles, where often a random photo is shown.
• In the accommodation section of the site, featured photos are mapped to locations and a selection is shown on each city page.

How Photos Are Featured

Photos on Travellerspoint are featured manually. That's right, real people look at ALL the photos uploaded to see if they are of a high enough quality to be featured. This happens sporadically - when the moderators have time to go through the photos. Don't expect your photos to be judged straight away. It usually will be looked at within a week though.

The Criteria

The criteria for choosing photos are somewhat subjective. After all, what might be a nice photo for one person is not so nice for another. That's why we have multiple moderators to ensure that the selection isn't too tainted by one person's aesthetic. There are however a few guidelines that we try to stick to.

• The photo needs to be of a reasonable size; a minimum of 400px wide / high is recommended, although we much prefer if a photo is uploaded at 800px wide/high (whichever side is largest). Any higher than that is pointless, as it will never be displayed that large on Travellerspoint.
• The photo needs to be sharp at these large sizes. Blurry photos can sometimes look nice at small sizes, but become more noticeable when seen a little larger.
• The photo shouldn't have extra borders around it. For consistency's sake, having one standard border for all featured images is our ideal situation. Occasionally a bordered photo will be featured, but this is usually quite an exceptional shot
• The photo should not be promotional (well, the photo will probably be deleted if it is actually)
• 

  Tour Eiffel - Paris

  © DiegoJesus

  The photo should not be "just another great shot of the Eiffel Tower". Other examples include Sydney Opera House, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, etc. If it is a common topic, then we really need to see an exceptional photo to want to feature it. There's only so many shots of the Eiffel Tower that we can take :)
• Photos of people posing are usually ignored.
• The photo needs to have some reason to be on a travel site. Of course, sometimes seemingly mundane things in your neighbourhood could be immensely interesting to someone in another country, so that is somewhat flexible. But we obviously need to see something that makes us consider it a travel shot rather than a product shot for instance.
• If it is of a REALLY unique subject, for instance a country that we don't have any photos of, we may ignore quite a few of these guidelines and feature it anyway, just because it is so unique.

Some Final Observations

• You may notice that on the main photography page, the large featured photo is always horizontal. This is solely due to layout reasons. That photo is randomly chosen from the last 20 featured horizontal photos.
• Photos that are featured can also be unfeatured at a later date. Occasionally we go through old galleries to see if perhaps there are a few photos of duplicate subjects or maybe just photos that on second thought aren't as good as they first seemed. Our standards are also becoming increasingly higher, so some of the originally featured photos would perhaps not be featured if they were uploaded today.