Need help optimizing MySQL query with joins?

I think you'd go a great way by getting rid of the subquery. Look at the first and last rows of the "explain" result - it's copying the entire "image" table to a temporary table. You could obtain the same result by replacing the subquery with INNER JOIN image and moving ORDER BY karma DESC to the final ORDER BY clause.

The real problem is that there is no need to optimize MySQL explain. There is usually a query (or several queries) that you want to be efficient and EXPLAIN is a way to see if the execution of the query is going to happen as you expect it to happen.

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