Shortlisted images in the running to be crowned Photobox Instagram photograph of the year range from furry friends to the Holi festival to the meaning of love. Judges, including the Guardian’s former picture editor Eamonn McCabe, have whittled down 180,000 submissions to unearth a shortlist that celebrates the best of social media. Winners will be announced October 3, 2018. Here: Najac, France. Travel shortlist. (Photo by Aaron Jenkin/@aaronjenkin)

Teenage girls are all steamed up these days about straight hair. The steam iron is replacing the huge rollers on which countless teens slept every night to achieve the height and curls fashionable until. The same girls endure having their hair stretched to absolute straightness on the ironing board, and then ironed to keep it that way. Unlike the roller setting, this takes teamwork. Gay Stilley, 14, goes through an ironing session with a couple of her friends at the Stilley Home in Glen Oaks, Queens, New York City on December 23, 1964. With a wary eye, Gay tries to watch the straightening process as one friend stretches her hair with a comb and another does the ironing, in the Stilley kitchen. (Photo by Marty Zimmerman/AP Photo)

Every November (AKA Dinovember), Refe Tuma and his wife pose their kids’ plastic dinosaurs engaging in activities in order to convince their kids the toys come to life while they sleep. It started out small, with dinosaurs stealing food from the kitchen and making small messes, but Dinovember quickely escalated into dinosaurs playing board games, kidnapping other toys, and watching that scene from The Land Before Time while crying tiny little toy dinosaur tears made from paper.

“7584 Fish”. On a windy day right after a Cyclone passed the far northern Great Barrier Reef i took some friends out to the reef. Never before i saw that many glass fish on this particular coral “bommie”. Just when i setup my camera, this Napoleon Wrasse swam right through the school of fish building a living frame. Photo location: Cairns, Great Barrier Reef, Flynn Reef, Australia. (Photo and caption by Christian Miller/National Geographic Photo Contest)

Tinni the dog and Sniffer the fox became quick friends, prompting the pooch's owner Torgeir Berge to start a campaign against the highly controversial fur trade after he noticed "how similar foxes and dogs actually are," calling the fox the "dog of the forest." Berge and his friend Berit Helberg plan to release a book sometime next year chronicling the duo, because "no animals should be living like the animals in the fur industry are living." According to animal advocacy group PETA, many creatures bound for the fur industry are allegedly kept in small, restrictive cages for their entire lives. Berge and Helberg said they plan to donate a portion of the proceeds to help save the Sniffers of the world, and we can totally see why.

In this Sunday, May 4, 2014 photo, Survivors sit with their possessions near the site of Friday's landslide that buried Abi-Barik village in Badakhshan province, northeastern Afghanistan. Stranded and with no homes, many of the families have struggled to get aid. Some have gone to nearby villages to stay with relatives or friends, while others have slept in tents provided by aid groups. The unlucky ones have slept outside. (Photo by Massoud Hossaini/AP Photo)

Visitors walk past the fully equipped dining table inside the “Crazy House”, which is completely built upside-down, in the village of Affoldern near the Edersee lake, May 7, 2014. Three friends came up with the idea to build the tourist attraction, which cost about 200,000 euros and took some six weeks to complete. (Photo by Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters)