I like the new photo scroll.  Well done, Jeff. 

👍🚴

All the credit goes to the journal authors who have shared their photos, and the readers who have faithfully liked them over the last seven years! I'm so delighted to finally have a place to highlight this community's most compelling images.

Thanks for that!

Well done!

Not only are there some stupendously great photos that I'd otherwise probably never have seen, making it a great way to discover interesting journals, it's fascinating to watch the parade.

It's also interesting to me that the upper set seems to scroll ever ... sooooooo ... slightly... faster than the lower row.  Sometimes.  

Thinking about it a little, I suppose that's inevitable and inescapable since the total width of photos in one row is unlikely ever to exactly equal the total width in the other; they'll have to scroll at independent rates to prevent a big white space in one row at the wrap-around point if they were kept in sync.

Strictly out of curiosity, and NOT intended as a criticism in any way: I've reloaded the page a few times, and note that I've already seen a few images more than once in different samples.  That leads me to surmise that somehow the entire trove of images has been pre-sampled to reduce the candidates to a smaller group that meet some criterion or other, before the page composing and loading process selects a few dozen arbitrarily for display.  I hope you didn't have to do the preselection manually!

Good question! The photo collection is curated, otherwise we'd often end up with too many food photos, pictures of wounds or dead animals, or other things that don't make a great impression on people who are new to CycleBlaze. The collection is around 900 images currently, although I expect to add more as I work through older and less-viewed journals. It's also limited to showing only one photo per set from the same journal. Those two factors are likely why you'll see repeats occasionally.

We're up to around 560,000 images on CycleBlaze, so I can't go through them manually. Instead, I generate lists of images based on relative popularity (i.e., images that have a higher-than-average rating compared to other images in the same journal) and go through those, picking out the ones I find most interesting, while trying to keep the subject matter varied (beautiful vistas, people shots, cultural scenes, etc.). This still means a lot of manual work, but I enjoy it — there are some truly remarkable photos and it's a treat when I find one.

You're right about the scroll speed. It's unlikely that the top and bottom rows would precisely align vertically, but I don't want the rows to look like a grid, so they move at slightly different speeds to ensure they never line up for more than a few seconds.

I like the idea that it's a juried selection, using crowdsourcing (relative numbers of Likes) as a proxy for an actual jury.

Harvesting / mining images from older journals, especially those transferred from you-know-where, will be a large effort if they didn't get much readership when the transplant happened.

I have to confess, it took me awhile to figure out what you all were talking about. Apparently I hardly ever linger on the homepage long enough to notice. Now that I see it though, very cool! Hopefully a great attraction for new arrivals to the site.

It's very cool and quite wonderful - thank you Jeff! And it seems that there is a new set of photos loaded each time I click on the home page - yes? 

Thanks Jeff, for both putting this in and the curation work! It's looking great.