I’ve always been amazed at the speed with which viewers would appear on pictures I uploaded to flickr. Sometimes, even late at night (I know it’s always noon somewhere) I’ll upload some photos and, as soon as the uploading is done, I’ll go look at the pictures to add them to a set or something and some pictures will already have viewers.
I don’t know how these viewers appear so quickly. Perhaps it’s just a sign of how huge flickr actually is.
I once posted some pictures of a couple friends of mine from the hessler street fair. Monday, I got back to work and I emailed her that the pictures were up there. She already knew. She said another friend of her’s had seen the picture and emailed her.
I typically put some kind of tags on my photos and I suppose many people have RSS feeds for certain tags. I wouldn’t be surprised that, after an event like hessler street fair, many people start looking for such pictures. I assume that’s how this happened.
I did solve a previous mystery related to viewers. Flickr allows you to see your photos ordered by number of views. I went to a party with a camera where most of the guests were very internet involved. I posted pictures of the party and sent the link to the invite list. Those pictures quickly became my most viewed by far.
Then, out of nowhere, a picture shot up way above the other pictures. It was a different picture from that same hessler street fair series. The weird thing is that there seemed to be absolutely nothing of interest in the picture. It was a random crowd shot. No one seemed particularly notable.
I’d link the picture here but, why give it more help?
Not only did it become my most viewed photo, but it continued to grow in views. Each week it lengthened it’s lead over the next most viewed. It’s now about triple the views of it’s next most viewed picture.
Eventually, I started googling for the name of the photo and I found that my picture was linked to from a fairly popular local blog. Mystery solved.
I assume most people come to pictures due to searches, especially tag searches. I don’t take a lot of overtly sexual pictures but I recently posted this picture of a poster that I saw on someone’s porch in Toronto.
Along with all the tags that went with the series of Toronto pictures I thought I would, partly as a joke, partly as an experiment, add the tag “Breasts”. Let’s see if that eventually moves up to my most viewed picture.