Flickr just announced that Pro members ($25 a year) are now able to keep track of stats for their photos! That’s right, you can actually see what photos are popular for today, this week, or over all time. You’ll also be able to view where people are coming from that are viewing your photos (what search engines, websites, etc…), and a handy graph will plot your traffic in an easy-to-read fashion.
Flickr says that this was one of their most requested features, and I definitely believe that. With all of the professional photographers on the site I’m sure they will enjoy the thorough tracking that this offers.
You’ll need to enable the stats before you can start using them, and then read up on some good facts about how the service works:
- It will take up to 24 hours for the stats to appear after you enable them
- Stats are updated once a day
- Immediately after enabling the stats you’ll receive the previous 28-days worth of traffic history, and then it will continue to keep stats for all-time
- Viewing your own photos doesn’t count in your stats
- External views, such as those on a blog, are not counted (only people who view the photo on Flickr are counted)
- Yahoo!, Google, AOL, MSN, ASK, and Live.com are the only search engines it detects
- When viewing the search engine stats you’ll be able to see what people were searching for
I’ve been a Flickr Pro user for several months now, and I don’t regret it one bit. Because of the advanced privacy features I can easily share my 6,000+ photos (7.5GB worth) with friends and family. My photos obviously don’t get many hits because of the privacy restrictions I place on them, but I’ll still enjoy seeing what photos are being viewed. Thanks Flickr, you never cease to amaze me!
It’s nice to see Flickr continuing to develop new features. It is still way ahead of Picasa in my view. Stats might be considered by some as not essential, but it is something I will find useful. Thanks for sharing.
I think that it’s way ahead of Picasa still as well. Google has released some smaller features for Picasa, but Flickr seems to be launching high-caliber features that people really love. The thing that pushed me to buy a Pro account was the addition of Collections, which made it possible for me to create closely replicate my folder-like structure on my computer for the images.
“7.5GB worth”
Holy crap! Do you guys run a photo studio in your spare time? ;)
HAHA… no, no photo studio. Ryan usually goes overboard on the photo-taking. And of course we have some cute nieces and nephews which are in a good portion of those photos. It is a lot of pictures!