unforth | Flickr Milestone

Well, I've been waiting for almost two weeks to cross the magic number, and now I have: today, my Flickr account broke half a million hits - 500,165 to be exact.

When I got a Flickr account, I wasn't really sure what it would come to. I hadn't taken that many pictures before, but I was starting to plan my trip to Japan, and it seemed like I should do something with them, and so I decided to spring for a Pro account, and uploaded my then small collection of photos. That was May 24th, 2007 (I know this because that's when I'll have to renew my pro account for the third time)

Since then, I've taken tens of thousands of pictures, of which 23,149 are currently uploaded. Save for just under 5,000 they're all labeled, and every picture I've taken that was worth a damn is uploaded save for those currently on my camera (the past week or so).

I can't begin to guess how many hours of my life have gone into the organization and labeling of these photographs. As I've taken more and more pictures of more and more different things, I've had to come up with increasingly complex ways of organizing the content in order to make it accessible - but the sad truth is that because I'm so far behind in labeling, I haven't had the time to do the top-to-bottom reorganization that I want to do.

Obviously, the photos reflect that things that interest me - art and zoos and flowers, geology and travel, anime and manga and doujinshi, and of course my friends and family. Ultimately, I don't take any picture that I don't want for my own interest, though - I resolved that my flickr account would be my own personal museum, since I'll never own a Rembrandt, a giant iridescent ammonite, a dinosaur, or any of a number of other things; nor, with my memory, am I likely to remember important events well unless I take pictures of them.

And it turns out that I really like to do it - both take the pictures and organize the pictures - so it's all been worth it.

The majority of the hits are to the anime and manga stuff. Out of the top 20 pictures by number of hits, only three of them aren't of anime and manga stills - and one of those three is of two anime cosplayers, so it almost counts (the top three non-anime images are a reticulated python skeleton at AMNH, with 1672 hits, the costume Mystique wore in the X-Men movies with 1465 hits, and One Piece Cosplayers that I saw while I was in Japan, with 1,160 hits.) The highest number of hits for a single picture is 3,533. And even with everything I've done, there are still 7,281 images that don't have a single view. As a result of this, the average picture that HAS had a view has had much more than one - it has in fact had 27 views!

The main obstacle to getting views for these images is labeling. Before an image is labeled, the chances are small that anyone will look at it, which is a big part of why I spend so much time getting them labeled. Because at this point, I have extensive evidence from comments and e-mails that I've received that people find what I've done to be useful, and I like that, and like being able to help, and I want to continue to ensure the utility of my images. I just wish that I could catch up, because then I could start to do some of the extras - updating the tags of older images, doing a reorg, providing links the collection databases of the museums which host the pieces so that viewers can get more info, that kind of thing - but all of that is very time consuming, and first I need to get everything at a basic level. On the plus side, in the last couple months I've started to catch up - I've labeled several thousand images in the past couple weeks.

Looking at the total views, 430,453 are views of individual pictures; the rest are views of my overall photostream, sets and collections.
But ultimately, this post is really just to honor this milestone. In just under two years, I've managed to accumulate all those hits. I wonder how many I'll have by this time next year?