For one day last week, I was a Flickr celebrity. Somehow my photos were picked up by both the Yahoo Editorial blog feed and the main Flickr blog, which sent my photo view statistics through the roof. Over the past three years or so, I’ve had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 35,000 views of my photos. That day I received 47,000.

Being in the right place at the right time was certainly important in getting my photos seen, as they were from an event that was just starting (the Sapporo Snow Festival). Using tags and keywords effectively probably also helped. The fact that my photos, while being of an event in Japan, were searchable in English may have had something to do with it too.

Strangely, far more of my views came from people who were looking at the Yahoo site rather than the Flickr blog. I find this interesting, because despite my attempt at mining through Yahoo and its associated sites, I can’t seem to find anywhere else that they have these photos featured. Things like this can get me nervous, as it means that my photos are potentially floating out in places that I don’t know about.

Nice and the Mediterranean ©Brian Farrell

I’m certain that this is happening with a couple of my photos of Nice, France already, but searching for images and their associated websites is a whole different ballgame than searching for other web links. Flickr does allow you to see incoming links to your photos (and so I can know very important things like searching for ‘horse punch’ in Google images will bring my picture up 5th in the results), but there appear to be ways for websites to circumvent this. Add to the fact that some of my pictures look very much like other pictures out there of the same thing, and it becomes very difficult to sort out which ones out there are mine.

That or someone I know just really wants to go to Nice, and keeps admiring the view in my photos. If that’s the case, they should know that while it’s a nice city, the beach was a bit of a disappointment.