Bear with me - the title will make sense in a bit…
I’ve been posting images on Flickr for about 10 months now, and (as regularly readers will be all too aware) quite like it. One could argue that I like it too much and that a busy person like me shouldn’t be spending so much time playing with photos, but it helps keep me sane so I do it anyway.
In the time since I started, I’ve been fortunate enough to receive some positive responses to some of my images, but I’m hardly a Flickr superstar like Helga Kvam or Thomas Hawk (and rightly so - their stuff is truly amazing). There are lots of ways to measure “popularity” on Flickr and, like all such attempts to assess on-line “popularity” or “success” or “importance”, they have some merit but are by no means definitive. One is counting the number of views an image gets, which is essentially the number of times someone (other than me) loads up that image’s page. This (sort of) measures how often someone was sufficiently interested by a thumbnail to go visit the image’s page to see it larger, read the comments, etc. This can be manipulated in a whole host of ways, though. Some of my more viewed images, for example, have those views because I’ve used them to illustrate posts here, or because they were used on the PRCA website to illustrate events or items there. And, as far as you know, I spend my lonely nights going around UMM’s Computer Science lab loading up my photos on one machine after another to crank up my view count.
Well, if that’s what I’ve been doing, I’m not very good at it, because in nearly a year my most viewed photo has just over 200 views, and only 15 have at least 100 views (out of 331 photos posted as of today). And every one of my 20 most viewed photos (with between 93 and 204 views) has been up for months collecting views. (In contrast, Kvam and Hawk have multiple images with multiple thousands of views and over 100 “Faves”.)
But today something really weird happened.
I’ve been wading through old images from, for example, our wonderful sabbatical year in the UK in 2000-2001 and our associated travels in Europe, cleaning a few up now and then and posting them. This morning I posted four shots of Sub-Evil Boy in Milan and Florence. One of these is the picture at the top of this post, where he’s happily chasing pigeons in front of the Duomo in Milan, presumably in homage to Mr. Lunch. Another is this crazy thing to the left, which I think is much cooler and which has (mostly) gotten more attention than the others (as I expected).
I posted these pictures in the morning and watched their “progress” as I sorted out other stuff in the office. I was fairly pleased with their slow accretion of views (but, sadly, no faves) and wandered off to class a little before noon. I came back roughly an hour and a half later to find that the picture at the top of this post no longer had the 1 or 2 views I’d left it with, but had 1,030 views!!! (I was really tempted to make the number blink to show my complete amazement, but decided to spare us all the horror.)
I just don’t get it.
It’s a nice enough photo, but hardly spectacular. And it has an order of magnitude more views than anything else in my posted photo stream? All collected in the space of an hour or two? I was actually quite alarmed - the traffic was so out of the ordinary that it felt like I’d been “hacked” somehow. If it had been a particularly cool photo, and there were a lot of comments and faves, I might just count my lucky stars and move on. But there was only one comment and no faves. It just doesn’t have the profile of a really popular image on Flickr.
My guess is that someone, somewhere posted it on some heavily visited site, but that it was only visible (or at least was only on the front page) for a brief period of time. It got all those views very quickly, and has only gotten four more in the 6 or 7 hours since. And the posting must have been in a very high traffic area that probably doesn’t have a high proportion of Flickr users. Assuming at most one in ten people that see such an image on something like a blog will click through to see the Flickr page (and I think that’s probably being generous) that means that something on the order of 10,000 people saw it wherever it was posted.
So, anyone know where that might have been? My attempts to find the link have so far failed, but that may be in part because even the mighty Google takes some time to update its view of the world, and this is all very recent. Consider this an electronic version of putting the photo on a milk carton. Anyone seen it around?
Thanks in advance for any info you can provide.
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I poked around some, and it appears that the issue is (in part) a problem with the bottom of the CAPTCHA being clipped off. So I modified the plug-in code so that generates images that are twice as tall as they used to be, and that does seem to have significantly improved the clipping issue.