Nat Geo Your Shot

» see yourshot.nationalgeographic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Your Shot began in 2006 as the most ordinary thing a magazine can offer a reader: one photo a month, with a chance of being printed. In May 2013 National Geographic rebuilt it as a website with member profiles and assignments run by its own photo editors. By 2016 it had 687,131 members in 131 countries and 5.5 million photos. By 2019 the uploads had passed ten million.

The assignments were the engine. A National Geographic photographer or editor would post a brief, it would stay open for about a month, and anyone could submit against it. One of them pulled in 35,000 images in three weeks. A Daily Dozen picked twelve pictures out of whatever had arrived that day. Around ten thousand people were on the site daily, averaging seven minutes each, which is a long visit for a photo site.

I work on computer vision now, on drones, so let me give the unsentimental description of what got deleted. Ten million photographs, each one captioned and located by the person who took it, attached to an account with a history, built up over six years by 687,000 people.

~ the dossier ~

~ the fox deal ~

Disney completed its acquisition of 21st Century Fox in March 2019 and with it took majority control of National Geographic Partners. Word of the Your Shot closure spread in August and the photography press picked it up in early September. The last day of access was set for 31 October. The stated plan was that assignments and photo promotion would move to National Geographic's Instagram feed, where the Your Shot audience was already past two million.

Photographers said what was wrong with that in a petition that went nowhere. The complaint, in their own words at the time, was that the work was being shoved into a platform that natively wants square photos, and that a community built around editors giving real feedback on composition was being moved somewhere with no mechanism for feedback at all.

~ what the numbers said at the end ~

Archive Team went in before the lights went out and left its counts on the wiki. Search was returning 10,254,953 results. The highest image ID anyone could find was 14,240,034. The gap between those two figures is roughly four million images that had already been removed by members or moderators before anybody tried to save the rest.

Their grab is marked partially saved on the wiki, which is the label you end up with when you find out about a ten-million-item site two months before it closes.

~ what members got ~

National Geographic gave members a window to download the photos they had personally uploaded. That covers your own files. It does not cover the assignment a photo was made for, the editor's note underneath it, or the profile of whoever shot the one next to it. The photographs were never the thing people were there for.

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