Who's looking at my kid?

July 28, 2006 4:18 AM

Over the last few days, one of my pictures on Flickr has received about 300 views. This represents a quarter of all views to all my pictures since I joined. Someone must be linking to it, how can I find out who's doing so?
posted by davehat to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

Best answer: Try putting a note in the title or description asking people?

Somebody will probably correct me but I don't think there's a way in Flickr to track referrals...
posted by randomination at 4:36 AM on July 28, 2006

Best answer: Go to Technorati and put the photo page's URL into the search box - that'll give you most of the links to it.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:38 AM on July 28, 2006

Unless they're very recent.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:39 AM on July 28, 2006

You could try using google to track who is linking to the page, but you would no doubt need to wait till the web is indexed again.

Google syntax:
'link:http://www.metafilter.com'
posted by a. at 4:39 AM on July 28, 2006

It may have ended up in the Interestingness pool. If you go to this page, you can check if you ended up there. Otherwise, you can do a Google search with link:photo URL to see if any sites are linking to your photo page.
posted by antifuse at 4:40 AM on July 28, 2006

Response by poster: OK, I've added it to my technorati search list and I've added a note. I'm not sure a technorati search will work as there are loads of different URLs for any given image.

Does anyone know which page (or pages) are counted?
posted by davehat at 4:44 AM on July 28, 2006

I thought Flickr only counted the main photo page? While that page can have many different iterations (viewed in set, viewed in photostream, etc etc), the base part of the URL should always be the same:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/username/number/*
posted by antifuse at 4:49 AM on July 28, 2006 [1 favorite]

Best answer: flickrinspector will show you if your photos have been in explore in the last 7 days, and it provides search terms to see if you've been blogged. (Plus other fun stats.)
posted by teg at 5:32 AM on July 28, 2006 [8 favorites]

You can also use a slightly different syntax to check for links (apparently Google's ":link" thing isn't totally accurate):

www.sitename.com -site:www.sitename.com
posted by TheDonF at 5:36 AM on July 28, 2006

Response by poster: Unfortunately, I'm not very interesting (according to Flickr, at least). I've set up a technorati watch list for my that image and for all my images, as nothing was returned just now.

I'm just a little wierded out because the image in question is a not particularly stunning picture of my 2 year old in a paddling pool....

BTW, the flickrinspector site threw up some interesting things... thanks for that link.
posted by davehat at 6:22 AM on July 28, 2006

You can set permissions to friends & family just in case it's anything weird...
posted by judith at 7:26 AM on July 28, 2006

Thanks teq. I was able to find that the WFMU blog linked to my copyrighted photos. Asshats!
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 8:50 AM on July 28, 2006

How about try to seach for the filename in a Google Image search?
posted by dantodd at 9:19 AM on July 28, 2006

How about try to seach for the filename in a Google Image search?
posted by dantodd at 11:19 AM CST on July 28 [+fave] [!]

Yeah, because DSC_0143.JPG is such a unique moniker...
posted by cellphone at 1:47 PM on July 28, 2006

That happened to me, and I just asked in the description if anyone would be kind enough to tell me where the photo was linked. And someone did answer fairly quickly.

This is probably the solution that requires the least effort on your part.
posted by clarissajoy at 2:07 PM on July 28, 2006

Response by poster: Well, I tried all of this and got no joy. I talked to my partner about it and when she saw the photo, she was horrified that I would put a photo of our son in a paddling pool up on the internet "where anyone could see it".

So I've done what judith suggested. Thanks for all the help.
posted by davehat at 11:50 PM on July 28, 2006