So Flickr. Let’s talk about it. You know, I had all of that trouble where my account got deleted and whatnot and so I’ve been building it up again from scratch. And I’ve been watching my numbers grow again.

Um… I’ve had my numbers wrong for a long time apparently. It finally dawned on me a short while back that the number I’ve been reporting as my views hasn’t really been accurate. I was saying I had 1.6 million views. That was actually wrong. Well, not technically wrong. But a worthless number. Allow me to explain. (It won’t matter to you, but it matters to me. )

Flickr provides the ability to look at your stats. I’ve known this from day one. However, I’ve always reported the number found on my page displaying my photostream like in the screenshot I took a short while ago (see below – click to enlarge).

When my account was cleared out, I was watching that number as I always had. 200 views. 483 views. 1000 views! Weeeeeeeee! But like I was saying Flickr makes some stats available within your account. They keep a running graph of your aggregate views. When my account was wiped, strangely, they kept a running tally of every stat from before EXCEPT views on the photostream. So the 1.6Million stat count, the number I was seeing reported on top of my photostream, was reset to zero. All of the other numbers stayed the same and I kind of just ignored them since I never really paid attention to that stat page anyway.

As I began to re-upload photos to my emptied out account, it dawned on me that I had been missing something. And paying attention to the wrong stats. Or rather, the stats I was paying attention to were irrelevant to me.

In their aggregate stats, Flickr reports on the number of views on the stream itself (what I’ve been discussing), the number of views on sets that you create, the number of views on collections you create, and most importantly, the number of views on your photos/videos. And they sum it all up for an aggregate view count.

I’ve been incorrectly assuming that the number reported (that I’ve been reporting) was the number of views on my individual photos. Because to me, that’s the only number that matters. To me, views on a stream is too abstract a concept that doesn’t express any meaningful statistic. A person can view your stream for any number of reasons without having any interest. However, a view on an individual photo or video is concrete. It shows dedicated interest.

Check the screenshot below and you can see what I’m talking about. The number circled (what tipped me off) is the same number that’s reported on my photostream page as seen above (with a slight difference in time I snapped the screenshot, hence the slight variation).

I wish I had paid attention more closely to these numbers when my account was re-activated. I wish I knew what my starting view count on photos was when I began this time around.

(Flickr provides some additional daily stats below that of views/favorites/comments on individual photos, the start of which you can see in the graph above, which I’ve always looked at and found interesting and that data is something I’d like to analyze more than on a day to day basis. But more on that below.)

Because of this mildly retarded revelation, I discovered that Statr which I was previously using, was reporting the same number. (Since my account was deleted, statr stopped tracking the numbers even though the account is the same; you can see the report date on the graph they produce.)

The plus side to all of this is that I’m approaching a good number and that number is 5 million. While Flickr reports that I have an aggregate view of 5.7M, the number includes all the other numbers and it’s just too aggregate-y to mean anything. So 5 million.

What I would LIKE to do is use Flickr’s API to build a utility that breaks down the stats more accurately and meaningfully for me. I like how Flickr’s stats keeps track of view counts, but the history is hard, if not impossible, to manage. I’d like to be able to see historically something like, “Ok, I posted the photo on this day and it took 3 days to get 50 favorites versus this photo which took 50 days to get 50 favorites.” I can look at the photos, look at what days I posted, look at the difference in photos, and see what works and what doesn’t. What is visually appealing in my photos? I want meaningful stats.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a factory of photos but stats can give insight even into something like photos and their publication that are impossible to guess. And hopefully, in combination with everything else, it will help me to become more aware as a photographer of what it is that I’m doing when I take a photograph.

Anyway, there you have it. I feel better.

Oh. My Flickr account is here in case you want to see. But it’s substantially less than what you see here on ipanemic (or on my other site).