First: I love Flickr. It's almost the perfect "photo gallery" for me.
One of the things I really really would like would be some simple stats so I could find out how more than 3000 people ended up seeing say my photo of the New York skyline. I linked to it from this weblog, but it only counts people who click on the photo and it can't be more than a few hundred. Or five hundred. Or a thousand.
I don't know exactly, but I do know that it's not 3000 so most of them must come from somewhere else. Where? Who linked to the photo, and more importantly: What did they say about it? Why can't I get my feedback?
I realize it'd be a lot of extra data in their MySQL databases, but it could be done in a simple way. I don't need exact science, just a few pointers ... In particular if the photo has had an "interestingness rating" that brought the visitors from the explorer then it should be reasonably easy to somehow mark it so I'd know and could be proud.
Another one: More than a thousand people saw my cliché sunrise over Los Angeles photo. How did they end up doing that?!
ps. Oh, I also want Flickr to pre-process larger versions to be downloaded.
Have you tried Google's "link:" feature?
You can put "link:http://flickr.com/photos/ask/226594388" into Google, and it will return all the pages in the known universe that link to that page.
Sadly, you have none. Scratch that idea!
Hi Jan,
Yeah - I'm not sure why that *never* turns out to work for my flickr images. Maybe because there are too many different ways to link to one image?
- ask
If flickr allowed user html templates then maybe you could have used something like Google Analytics on your template.
Besides, I am pretty sure that Yahoo must be saving their access logs for Flickr somewhere. It would not be hard to stick it into a database and make it available for public consumption. Only a bit time consuming and, without a very good profit motive (?).
You can always use free libraries like ImageMagick (http://www.ImageMagick.org) to preprocess your images before upload. It is very simple and I do that with mine to make the most out of my free account. I never post anything bigger than 640x480. The bigger originals are available upon request.
Alok: I imagine they are worried about being sucked into re-creating Google Analytics if they start doing any sort of "log stuff".
Gerry: I want it the other way around - I want them to make say a 2048px wide version available, too, from larger images instead of just a 1024px wide one.