When I post a picture to the plants database I get a "thumbs up" response from various members almost immediately (within minutes). How do they know that a new photo has been posted? I have tried going to the plants database to look at photos but the "posted today" box that I checked gave me pictures from 2017 and older. How can I see new entries without going through each individual plants entry?

I'm guessing they get it from the Recent Images on the home page (which I'll admit I seldom actually go to ). Click on the NGA Banner above at the left side of it and you'll get there.

@Murky, thank you!

I see the most recent database images on my home page but I think you have to customize your home page to have them show up.

If you are logged on to the site, scroll all the way to the bottom of your home page and click: Customize your home page and you can drag items from the left, over to the right side to customize how you want your home page to look. Just remember to select: View your finished dashboard so that they are saved!

@plantladylynn @Murky Thank you both for the info. Apparently I had already set this up but I never go to my home page. Well now I have and it hasn't solved my issue. Here's the first picture under the heading recent photos.

This photo wasn't taken recently according to the database info. Does that mean it was taken some time ago and just posted and the date reflects when it was taken and not when it was posted? I'm just trying to understand. I think I'll post a photo that I took years ago to the database and see if it pops up in recent photos That should give me the answer. Thank you both for directing me to my own homepage. I can't believe that I've never looked at it since I joined this group.

I'm not seeing a way to actually tell when the photo is uploaded, but I could very well be missing what's right in front of me! I do see the bloom info, which is when the photo was taken. I often upload images that are several years old to me, but still would make it new to the database.

Yes, I'm reasonably sure that is what is happening.

If you click on the plant database:
https://garden.org/plants/

Scroll down to click "see more new plant database photos":
https://garden.org/apps/plant_...

It's set to show the new pics in the last 24 hours, but you can set it to the last week, last month, last year, or forever.

You can also change the "new" to "popular" to see the photos in order from the most-liked on down.

You can choose to look at pics from just 1 kind of plant. It's very fun to browse pretty pics. I do it constantly, while watching TV, down time @ work, etc...

The date a photo was taken is a separate piece of info from when it was uploaded. Regardless of when it was taken, it will be ordered by the date uploaded (unless set to "popular" instead of "new.")

That Date of photo info is something that a camera stores as part of the info for a photo, you will notice when you scroll through the list of recently uploaded photos that not all images have that info. And it may be that not all images uploaded would automatically add it either, not sure.
Cell phones don't store and transfer that info as far as I know so it leaves that field blank, as you can see by other images in the list.

That date that the pic was taken can be added manually if it doesn't automatically populate that field when the pic is uploaded.

Thank you all for the info. The site was populating correctly, I was just confused by the dates and the sheer quantity of photos loaded in one day. There were ten pages of photos in "today" and the dates of when they were taken ranged from today to back several years. Now I know to look at newly posted photos daily so that I can see everyone's photos as they are posted, which is what I was looking for.