Flickr's 18 Most Iconic Photos Of The Year

Why is it that each year feels more momentous than the last? Perhaps it's that the increasing shareability of news keeps events in the collective consciousness much longer than in the newspaper days. Whatever the reason, the biggest stories of the past 12 months -- from the Royal Wedding to the Arab Spring to the last space shuttle launch -- have felt huge.

Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site Flickr has filtered through mountains of content to find the year's best, most representative photographs. Using what a spokesperson for Flickr told The Huffington Post was an "interestingness" algorithm, the site selected 18 of most stunning snaptshots uploaded by users.

The Next Web celebrates the quality of Flickr's Year In Photos series. "While Instagram has captured the imagination of budding mobile photographers everywhere, Flickr still has some amazing near-professional content on its platform," writes TNW. In fact, many professionals maintain Flickr pages, such as the official White House account or the NASA Goddard page.

According to VentureBeat, Flickr provides a geo-tagging feature, which lets its 70 million users easily associate their photos with specific locations, which makes for easier searching and grouping. Of the 6 billion photos currently on the site, over 250 million have been geo-tagged.

Check out Flickr's 18 most stunning photos of the year (below). If you're still feeling nostalgic for 2011, check out Yahoo users' favorite search terms of the year, as well as the most-shared stories on Facebook, Twitter's most iconic moments and Google's fastest-rising search terms.

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Comments

[Matthew Wanser]

01:17 PM on 12/28/2011

Huff post has done a good job using bait and switch for their headlines. They've gotten me to click on things I would not have read if I knew better. These photos are not iconic. They are representative of this year's big news stories, but they are relatively banal.

[Vintage59]

04:24 PM on 12/25/2011

Weak.

[d may]

06:40 AM on 12/25/2011

The pics I saw were some "entourage" event ???

[Certified Jatt]

05:29 AM on 12/25/2011

Everything on HP is either Iconic, Best, or Shocking.

[mjeffn]

11:59 AM on 12/25/2011

American culture. Gets kind of annoying, doesn't it?

[mccord82]

12:54 AM on 12/24/2011

There wasn't a good photo in the entire bunch. These are iconic events.

[smilodon1]

09:13 PM on 12/23/2011

No pictures of protesters being pepper sprayed?

[Eddie VanderMolen]

02:25 PM on 12/23/2011

OMG!!! Pic 15, I've met her. That's Kat! Holy cow! She's pretty cool. She's from my little town in Michigan. Small world after all.

[Madbunny]

10:15 PM on 12/23/2011

Pretty good breast recognition skills there.

[UserNameJane]

11:42 AM on 12/23/2011

Not a whole lot of imagination.

[MIKEinNYC]

08:05 AM on 12/23/2011

Why would I want to upload picture to Flickr and why would anyone want to check out pictures that have been uploaded?

[FreelanceWriter]

07:04 AM on 12/23/2011

>> QUOTE: "Using what a spokesperson for Flickr told The Huffington Post was an "interestingness" algorithm, the site selected 18 of most stunning snaptshots uploaded by users."

Iconic? Really??? Gee, just a little friendly tip for Flickr:
You need to hire MUCH better mathematicians to tweak that algorithm A LOT.

[Highball]

06:44 AM on 12/23/2011

Those were more iconic events, not iconic photos.

[ykk9]

03:57 AM on 12/23/2011

Glasses on a Harry Potter ticket stub, Whats the word I'm looking for... Oh yeah, Iconic!

[MichaelFroemel]

03:21 AM on 12/23/2011

Democracy through technology.

[Goldie Treasure]

01:58 AM on 12/23/2011

Most of these pics except like 1 or 2 sucked.

[SvrWx]

12:31 AM on 12/23/2011

You know...the majority of those were no big deal. They seemed like Iphone photo's.