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What does 'most viewed' photos mean?


as de beer

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Hi

 

This question must have been asked a 1 000 times, but I do not seem to be able

to find the right answer. Does 'most viewed' photos mean:

 

(a) Viewers who have looked at the thumbnails and also speeded past

(i.e. 'viewed') your photo for a nano second, or

 

(b) Viewers who have taken the trouble to CLICK and view your specific photo,

or

 

© both a & b?, or

 

(d) something else?

 

And I suppose, a second question would be: where does one find an easy

accessable answer to the above? Surfing up and down Google did not help (at

least as far as I could see).

 

Thanks for your time

asdeb

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Brian Mottershead explained that each time the PN servers served an image, no matter whether in the TRP gallery, your bio page (one of three there under most configurations), or anywhere else, it was a 'view' and if someone clicked on the photo, that was an additional 'view', and furthermore, if someone clicked on a 'large' view of the photo, that counted as an additional 'view'. Just so long as the server served the photo 'view' from its stored image with your image number intact, that counted as a view (I don't know if it counted if it served it to you if you are logged on and I think it didn't . . . but if you weren't logged on, I am sure it would have counted that as a view . . . but if you hadn't cleaned your browser cache since the last viewing of your photos, apparently they would not be 'served' (as I understand it) and therefore it would not count as 'views' if you called on a particular photo or folder.

 

I hope that helps, because it seems inevitable that 'most viewed' must be a function of 'served views' whether 'seen' or 'not seen'.

 

John (Crosley)

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I am intrigued as to what "views" means as well. AS de Beer has posed the question very succinctly and simply. An answer to his a) b) c) or d) would clarify things for me as well. John, I'm sure your response makes sense to all but the technically challenged like myself, I just don't understand what you are saying. Is it beyond explanation in layman's terms?
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Feeding the image into Google Images wouldn't help. Requests for an image that come from outside photo.net are filtered out of the counts. Otherwise, the most viewed image might be one that was put on photo.net for the sake of image hosting for a Korean blog or an eBay ad (for example).

 

Regarding the effect of caches, images being in browser or proxy server caches can suppress the view counts. However, many caches do send an "If-Modified-Since" request to the web server on a cached URL, to determine if it is stale. A server will respond "Not Modified" if the URL is still the same, and will send the new content if it has been modified. We count these "If-Modified-Since" requests for the images as "views". This mitigates some, though not all, of the erosion in the counts due to caches.

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