2006: A Year In Review

2006 was a great year for The Lens Flare. We introduced image contests (http://www.thelensflare.com/contest.php), added over 3000 dynamic galleries (http://www.thelensflare.com/category/nav.php) that are populated based on the words used in each image's description, and added a place for articles (http://www.thelensflare.com/docs/index.php/Main_Page) that are related to art and photography. We've also had our challenges. Comment & forum spam reached an all time high although it has dropped significantly after implementing a filter to weed out most of the inappropriate comments.

We welcomed 189 new members in 2006 bringing our members with galleries to 782. 10,000 of our current 23,000 images were uploaded in 2006. Over 238,000 people visited The Lens Flare, and they viewed over 2.1 million pages. Almost all of this traffic was generated either by searches on Google, by members showing off their images to friends and family, or people linking to image pages from other forums and blogs.

Did you know that it's both possible and allowed to hotlink to your TLF images on your blogs and other websites such as other forums? (Hot linking means to use the image directly on TLF's website from another website) All we ask is that you add a normal HTML link to one of TLF's pages (the home page, your profile or gallery page, or the HTML webpage that displays your large image). Most other photo sharing sites do not allow this, but we'd like you to proudly display your artwork everywhere you can.

Looking forward to 2007 and beyond, we plan on revamping the website to make it easier to use, more customizable, and more ways to interact with others on the site.