First of all, congrats - it's a fine shot and well deserving - one to be proud of. I'm curious, though, of your shots that you've put up on Flickr, where would YOU rank this one? And what has been the fate of your very favorite shots that the Explore bots didn't shine their light on?
10,000 views is kind of an interesting metric I'd never thought about before this thread. I knew a few of my Explore shots had gone really viral but never thought about just HOW viral. I just checked them out (
Scout: Find your photos in Flickr's Explore pages. is a place you can see all of your Explored shots, including those that had been on it and dropped) and it turns out I've had 4 shots go over 10,000. Two of them were shot with Fujis, one with the RX1, and one with the Nikon DF. They were ALL from 2014 even though I have Explore shots going back to April 2012, which suggests that Flickr or Explore has gotten a lot busier recently or something. I've only had three 2015 shots Explored - two of them were quickly dropped and the other, which is an OK photo but not that great, has almost 9000 views. So I think some of Flickr's more recent business moves must be working for them, just based on traffic...
As with Explore generally, there's no rhyme or reason to the most viewed. My most viewed has over 16,000 and it's a shot I think deserved to be among my most viewed - I have a 20x30 print of it on my wall and wasn't surprised that it got a lot of attention. The other three were all afterthought shots that I didn't even think enough of to process at first but then later decided to and for some reason THOSE were the ones that got the most views... I'll never EVER understand how Explore works but I don't think I've ever had a shot go much over a couple thousand views if it wasn't picked for Explore. And, of course, most of MY favorite shots never got Explored or got much attention at all, so I continue to be rather cynical about the whole Explore phenomenon...
One thing that surprised me was that a couple that were dropped from Explore had far more views than several that are still included in Explore. I always thought that lack of interest is what got them dropped, but evidently there are other criteria???
-Ray