Well happy new year 2016 to all ye folk!
Last year was pretty good (not ideal, but when is it?) and we are ready to move on to bigger and better things.
For one this group has now amassed a substantial collection of art that keeps getting bigger and bigger. (What a difference half-a-year makes!)
And here's a small guide to help you tell what's where.
1. The main gallery has 2 sections - featured and sexy.
a) Featured: Is where the main bulk of all art goes. Note however that the presence of a Sexy category does not imply that this contains only SFW arts in the slightest, just that it is trying harder.
b) The sexy stuff: This is a category for all those pieces whose main purpose is being sexy. Pin-ups, explicit nudity, more fetishy stuff. Even, yes, (le gasp) furry(ish) things. On a site like dA it is notably hard to escape their prevalence.
2. Favourites:
a) Featured: This is a collection of things I or other contributors have felt deserve a view, but don't really fit the criteria for being included in the group - not enough in dimension or detail or whatever.
b) The "couldn't be bothered" collections: Here's where you need a little primer on how groups on dA work - to appear in the main gallery a deviation first has to be submitted to the group by a contributor. Then the artist has to accept the submission. It's a two-way process. This causes the group to be listed in the section "Featured in Groups" on said deviation. However sometimes that last part - acceptance by the artist fails for whatever reason(perhaps the artist wants it to be Featured only in certain groups or none at all or he's simply not visiting the site anymore). All such pieces are located here.
c) Wallpaperly: This is where deviations that might be suitable as a wallpaper are put. Mostly it's 16:9 or 16:10(sorry multi-monitor people).
A few friends have suggested some more division in the categories, but I'm not even sure where to start. If any of you have ideas, feel free to pitch in, maybe even help.
Finally, perhaps it would be helpful to provide a little more detail on the inclusion criteria - it is really quite simple:
It must be high resolution and high detail. Past that anything goes. (Though I try to steer clear of flooding it with too many ponies. It's not easy.)
High resolution: Must be above 2.5 MPixels, usually at least 1K in every dimension(might go down to 2 if it is exceptionally detailed, but never lower).
High detail: This is a little hard to define, but things like clean lines and strokes, good composition, lots of things going on in the picture, etc. Also - no chromatic aberration effect(I hate it with a fiery passion! I have absolutely no clue why artists would think it adds anything to the picture. Maybe they think it's contributing to distinguishing their own unique style? It is gimicky and doesn't help that anyway).
Perhaps a counter-example might best illustrate this:
artsdemon.deviantart.com/art/N…
This is a piece that is obviously very high in resolution, but even on small scales it looks like a sketch and has very little detail to speak of.
And with that I bid you farewell for now and happy arts-spelunking.