'BAD, BAD PANDA!': Here's The Story Behind The Most Famous Photo on Flickr
The photo - which appears any time the site is having system problems - shows a young girl pulling a leashed expressionless panda bear statue in the middle of a farm road. The error message reads, "Bad, bad panda! Come on we want photos."
It is part of a 200+ series entitled My Daughter Kanna, featuring Toyokazu's 5-year-old posing with playful props on a road near their home in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan.
According to Markus Spiering, Flickr's Head of Product, the online photo sharing site was looking for a fun photograph with a simple message.
"We don't like when we have to serve an error message so we wanted to find something that would still make users smile. We looked through a selection of photos before finding Toyokazu's photo and we felt this panda was the best fit," he wrote via email.
Spiering also mentioned that panda bears are the official mascot for the site, with application programming interface (API) methods flickr.panda.getPhotos and flickr.panda.getList and playful description of processes using imaginary pandas Ling Ling, Hsing Hsing, and Wang Wang.
Toyokazu wrote by email that he was happy to see a piece of his father-daughter weekend bonding activity become so popular. He plans on taking more pictures of his eldest daughter who just recently turned 10-years-old.
"I'm really looking forward to seeing what kind of adults they'll become. That's why I want to make sure I capture the two of them, in picture form, as they are now, " Toyokazu wrote via email.
Here are a few more photos from Toyokazu's photography series:
