Before starting this post, if you want to skip to the IMPORTANT RULES UPDATE scroll down to the section with that same title in red!
First, I want to thank everyone that shares their photographic content here in our amazing community! We wouldn't have such an awesome PHOTOGRAPHY LOVERS COMMUNITY on HIVE without the participation of you all. I also want to thank those that take the time to comment, upvote, and engage within the community, even if you don't post your photos here.
Not every Photography Lover is a photographer and we value that. Not every photographer we have here posting is professional and we also value and respect that! We are all here to celebrate our love and passion for photography together one way or another here ON HIVE.
Many here are professionals with top of the line equipment, some have inexpensive point and shoot digital cameras, while others are hobbyists and amateurs using their phone cameras. Some are only here to appreciate the talent and beauty, but all subscribers and visitors are truly valued and welcome here in the Photography Lovers Community!
The Photography Lovers Community was created and established by 
After going over some data and analytics, it appears we have succeeded!
The official Community Account was created in November 2019 and our Contest and Curation Badge Account was created in September 2020. I'm not sure how big or active the community was at this time, but #photography has been one of the most prolific content tags and topics dating back to Steem, even before communities existed.
We were growing enough that we decided to start showcasing our talented photographers in the Community Curation Reports back in October 2020. We also decided to start giving 5% beneficiary payout for the selected thumbnails of our Community Curation Reports. Our community curation efforts have also been boosted by OCD Manual Curation Delegation Rewards Service as part of the OCD Community Incubation Program.
OCD supports a numerous amount of communities, countless users, and projects that always add value to the Hive Ecosystem. Too many projects and positive initiatives to mention here. Check out their links to see what i mean if you aren't already aware! I am proud to work with OCD as a curator and community manager, and this community has been truly blessed by the OCD Incubation program.
As of the latest OCD Communities Incubation Program - Update #106 (and on average as far back in monthly reports as i could go) the Photography Lovers Community has been ranked number 1 in subscriber count/growth and community interactions.
I don't think it will always be the case, but from what i can see on Hive.Blog Communities Photography Lovers is the third-largest community on Hive by number of subscribers and ranked 5th (i'm not sure what rank is based on) overall. I also looked, and it seems we have about 76 Photography Communities on Hive currently.
And at the time of writing this post, we have 16,902 community subscribers 700 active users and $3,976 pending rewards from 3,427 interactions and posts! That's quite an incredible performance analysis!
Curation is one of the best perks of the job... but it's truly a labor of love!
For quite some time now, due to life circumstances and other reasons, i have been curating and managing the Photography Lovers Community predominantly on my own. I consider it an honor and a privilege to be able to be in this position and am in no way complaining about my duties, but rather explaining what goes on behind the scenes to make this all run smoothly.
I do my best to sift through almost every single post in our community multiple times a day. Based on our numbers, you can already guess that can be quite a process. Photography Lovers is not the only top 10 community that i curate and manage, predominantly by myself, either... but that doesn't lessen my commitment to this community.
Managing and curating consists of many tasks. Checking for plagiarism and non-original content is one of the main time-consuming duties, especially when it comes to multiple languages to examine. Checking the text and images to determine if they are original content becomes more challenging every day with the advancement of technology.
However, The Photography Lovers Community is committed to maintaining a level of excellence and quality on Hive when it comes to our community standards. I will keep some of the OCD curation requirements undisclosed as not to have people find ways to take advantage of our methods.
We have the requirements for getting curated with larger votes in every community curation HotShots post here in Photography Lovers. Our community description and rules generally describes what essentially qualifies for curation. But, for your convenience, i will add the list again here.
We will not be curating single-image posts, especially with little to no description. This community is focused on high-quality content which includes what surrounds the images you share here.
We do not curate cross-posts
We love to curate and reward accounts posting properly into this community, so long as they are abiding by the rules and guidelines. Remember, we do not curate single image posts, and though our community is photo-oriented, we do require that any text used in your posts be original content or otherwise sourced and cited properly.
I know that we have many excellent photographers that migrated to Hive from Steem. I also know we have many photographers that still post and are active on Steem. We also have users here that are active on Blurt.
Personally, i have not held back showcasing many photographers in our community, here on Hive, just because the user is also active on Steem or Blurt. Many people doubled their money if they were around before the Hive hardfork. I never blamed anyone for keeping it rolling.
However, those folks never get curated for rewards here on Hive. That is, unless i make a mistake..... and believe me, i make plenty. After being chided for this mistake on more than one occasion, i have decided to make my life much easier and eliminate the problem from the root cause. I will continue to feature valid posts from those active users (for now) in the community curation posts... but they will not be curated for votes. Let me explain a little.
The STEEM saga wasn't just a hostile, competitive takeover. HIVE was created specifically and directly due to THEFT. Many may be unaware of the story, but I can not support any user here in this community that is active and posting on STEEM any longer.
I'm not insinuating that anyone here was complicit but i am saying that it is a conflict of interest to Hive, in my personal opinion, and therefore unethical to support users here, on HIVE from HIVE rewards, to users active on BLURT and STEEM.
Blurt does not have a downvote feature and therefore manipulates the reward pool by removing such options. So, users active on Blurt will no longer be supported in this community either.
Since it takes time to Power Down and liquidate a STEEM and/or BLURT account, there will be a period of time affording all users sufficient amnesty to remove themselves from Blurt and STEEM.
For obvious reasons, i will not disclose how much time that amnesty period will be... but i assure you it will be sufficient time to make arrangements and disengage over there on all accords.
It is always with a heavy heart, except with scammers and thieves, that i have to mute posts or users. My hope is that most will cash out over there and roll their Steem/Blurt Stake into HIVE. But, what they do with their rewards over there is totally up to them.
I hate to have to make people pick a side, but I chose mine a long time ago. Unfortunately, for some, if they want to continue to participate in the Photography Lovers Community they will have to choose to be exclusive to HIVE as a user.
As i pointed out above, there are 75 other Photography Communities on Hive that you can still post in. I don't know their rules or policies... so make sure and check out their community descriptions and rules to make sure your posts fit into their guidelines.
I can only personally vouch for a handful of them as being of a HIVE standard of quality when it comes to community management and content. So, choose wisely if you want to stick with Steem and Blurt.
The last Update to address is the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and it's influence in generative art as it relates to photography and more specifically this community.
We have always had an open policy about this community being centered around photography which is an artform itself. So, we have been flexible with how photography is used and presented artistically in practice and presentation within our users' posts.
For example, photo's of art for the sake of sharing the art in the photo is probablly better fit in an art community, especially if it's to promote your art.
In contrast, a post with photos of art where the photos themselves add an extra dimension to the art or becomes an artwork in and of itself would be fully acceptable here. I have even made a few posts myself using my art to make creative macro photographs! However, it can still be very subjective and difficult at times as a curator to decide.
The same can be said for NSFW content. While we do allow NSFW content in this community, we are VERY diligent that all NSFW content is photographically relevant, classy, and artistic in it's quality.
Anything pornographic or too explicit will result in an automatic mute. When to use the NSFW tag to self-censor a post from those with the 'view NSFW' settings turned off can be controversial and confusing to figure out for many. Making a mistake in this area could get some negative attention or downvotes.
So, it can be a difficult decision to make for a content creator of that nature at times.
The line between what makes an image art with value or just something vulgar can vary from individual to individual and culture to culture. Sometimes art is intended to be vulgar to express the value of what statement is being made through the art. So, this is another layer of decision making and scrutiny we go through to keep the quality up to our community standards and expectations as well as those of HIVE as an ecosystem.
Those could both have been a series of posts in and of themselves... but let me finish this post up and get to the last points. I have been curating and keeping up with (as best i can) A.I. art and it's advancements for the last couple of years. I won't go into details here, but suffice it to say that multiple technologies can generate photo-realistic images virtually indistiguishible from actual digital photography.
This of course will make curators' work much more difficult. ChatGPT is also now entering the realm of generating text using AI in a similar fashion to the art field. This technology, while new and extremely controversial, is here to stay and will only grow and develop more over a short period of time.
In order to embrace the coming wave of technology as a tool, we are willing to comprimise here in the community to an extent. AI programs can be used to edit photographs now. I predict this will automate a lot of what makes Photoshop, Lightroom and other such photo editing software not so user friendly for those unfamiliar with all of their options.
For now, we will accept posts that have Original Photographic Content manipulated with AI programs. The posts must include the original unaltered (by AI) photograph and then the alterations or edits. Your post should still be mostly focused on photography in general but this is an amazing opportunity for creativity. We won't accept posts that depend on AI too much for your content creation.
Since this is a whole new spectrum of options and it's all subjective it will be our community leaders and curators (mostly my) discretion which Photography AI posts are fit for this community. If they are unfit for here they may qualify in the other AI ART Communities.
As this post was started, i would like to finish it by thanking everyone. I want to thank each and every one of you that has been a part of this amazing experience and in this community in particular.
I want to extend my gratitude to all the Lovers of Photography that share so much of their passion and craft as well as their talents and captured beauty. We are all fortunate to have a place like this to group together and support one another.
Special thanks to Wes, Andy, Acid, and the OCD team that does all the stuff above my head. Thanks to all the other folks that do similar things like me, and to all the users that we serve to keep this experience one that is fair and enjoybale for us all.
I didn't intend this post to have any negative vibes or intentions. If there are any concerns to address or questions to ask, please feel free to tag me and to ask in the comments. For those that don't want to discuss the Steem stuff in public on chain here, can feel free to message me on Discord.
