How We Select Monthly Categories

Monthly Categories

When we launched Categories, we started with 24 and left ourselves room to grow. We knew we needed a way to keep adding to them that would be engaging without feeling gross or overwhelming the community. Enter Monthly Categories.

Over time, as our community evolved, the Monthly Category became more or less a theme for any given month. While we have a list of potential Categories we’re always drawing from, most are decided a week or so before they go live.

What We Consider

Team Reflection™ banded together over the last two months to bring us the Reflection Category. Have a Category you’ve really wanted for a while? Perfect — here’s how we go about selecting a Monthly Category:

Location agnostic. Glass is a global community with members everywhere. While a Category like Americana would be incredible, it’d only be incredible for a minority of members.

Doesn’t overlap with existing Categories.

Unless those Categories are Architecture, Cityscape, Landscape, Nature, or Street. Then please do overlap. Those are, by a healthy margin, our busiest Categories, and having more options for new photos is a good thing. For example — Reflection is an incredible addition to Street, but doesn’t exclusively mean Street photos.

Make sure it’s accessible to the larger community. Double Exposure would be such a fun Category. But only for roughly 2-5% of the community. The barrier to entry for double exposures is either a newer, digital camera, film cameras, or Photoshop and other specific apps. Versus a Category like Birds, which may not be a wildly popular Category, but the only barrier to entry is going out and photographing birds.

Easily understandable. Banal has been suggested a handful of times, but it's more of a type of photography that you know when you see. It's hard to succinctly describe in a way that someone immediately understands. Which makes it a less than ideal Category.

Suggest Your Categories!

The last step for getting the Monthly Category you want is telling us! Tag Daniel (and Tom too, just for good measure) on one of your photos that would fit in the Category. Post that type of photo repeatedly. Maybe start a small movement. Add a ™ sign to your name. Who knows? Maybe we’ll select your Category next.