running through flickr.

i have had my flickr account for more than 2 years now. at first i thought i'll try it as another online photo gallery to supplement my deviantart. eventually, i realized that i could hotlink to photos stored in flickr. that would've been very useful for blogging (back in early 2005) when it was still sometimes difficult to find another server to host photos with hotlinking allowed, but without bandwidth restrictions, and without the service folding after a few months.

the only problem with a flickr free account is it limits the number of displayable images to 200. if one uploads more than 200 photos, the older photos become inaccessible (although they are not removed from the server).

a few months back, when i figured i'd be using flickr more heavily, i decided to get a pro account (and get that ^PRO user mark written next to my username). so there's that.

flickr has this thing of gauging what it calls "interestingness" of submitted photos. according to flickr, these are the 20 most interesting photos i uploaded:






i'm not really sure how interestingness is determined. it seems to be calculated based on the number of favorites, comments, and page views a photo has received (in that order of importance).

apparently a lot of my marian photos were thought as interesting because there are plenty of local flickr users who are surprisingly very interested in catholic religious art. (or not so surpringly -- this is the philippines, after all.)

a funnier thing was that i was invited to numerous flickr groups on religious icon after i posted my marian photos, as if taking photos of the BVM is an active hobby¹ (it isn't; i prefer street photography, on the whole).

i am still amused that the 3 photos in my gallery that gathered the highest number of page views were from billboards that showed nearly-naked men. it's a bit of a contrast compared to the religious icons, don't you think?

here are the 20 most viewed images in my gallery:






many of them (5 out of 20) are photos of daryl. strangely, my favorite daryl photo is not in the top 60 most viewed photos.

the following are 5 photos with the most number of people marking them as favorites:



i was surprised the most marked favorite photos were those two marian photos. among the marian photos, there were other photos that i thought were more interesting, or better captured.

i was thinking of submitting the 4th photo in a local photography contest but they required photos to be taken using a canon-made camera. (it was taken using my first digicam, which was a casio.)

lastly, the following are 10 photos with the most number of comments received (flickr includes comments from the gallery owner in their count):




if you ask me what's the purpose of writing about the stats of my flickr gallery, i really have no idea. and it's too much effort extracting and compiling the URLs of the photo thumbnails (i cheated using frontpage and copy-pasting).

it seemed like a good idea; for me, at least. it's like spring cleaning, or making an inventory of books. it's doing something for the sake of doing something to keep the mind busy and stop it from wallowing in romanticized self-agony.

i feel better now.



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¹ daryl is often puzzled why i seem to be interested in catholic religious icons and architecture, despite being agnostic. it's not so much as the fact that they are catholic images that interest me to them; it's the fact that religious images have a really strong emotional hold on the people who follow such particular faith.² it doesn't matter if it's a catholic image; i'd be just as interested to photograph a shinto shrine or a hindu temple. but where could you find those in the philippines? [back]

² i was browsing through an art book titled blasphemy: art that offends in powerbooks yesterday. it presents samples of art works that caused outcries from certain religions because of the depictions of religious images in a manner considered inappropriate. but there you go. [back]