How do we curate the feed of raw nature, worldly wonder, and global adventure that 64 million people follow on the National Geographic Instagram account? We don't. All we do is share our password with a hundred of our favorite photographers and encourage them to post often (but not too often)—and somehow, it works.

Photography can't be easily described up in statistics and numbers, but we can say that 2016 was our most successful year yet. We gained 24 million followers, logged 26.1 million comments, and totaled 3.3 billion likes. We put a collection of Instagram images in a book, @NatGeo, that we published this year, and continued to grow our issue-area accounts, including @NatGeoTravel and