MetaChat - Oddly popular pictures.

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18 October 2010

Oddly popular pictures. What's your single most uncannily popular picture on Flickr? →[More:]

Mine is a picture of school lunch from Shenzhen, China. Since I posted it, it's been viewed over 1500 times, nearly 8 times more than any other pictures I've posted.

post by: gc at: 06:39 | 32 comments

The most viewed picture I have is a photo of the engine bay of my Bug, but that's just because I posted to The Samba for some advice about wiring.

posted by octothorpe 18 October | 07:39

This Holga photo of a Ferris wheel. Most days it's my most-viewed photo. I like the pic, but I have no idea why it got so popular.

posted by BoringPostcards 18 October | 08:05

Aaargh, refusing to hyperlink as I don't want to give the damn thing any more Google mojo.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/theophileescargot/874950388/

It's not even a photo, just a crude graph of my weight from 2007. Posted it in an Ask Mefi answer years ago and it still gets hits every day. It's vastly more popular than any other Flickr pic of mine. It's not even due to bots or Mefipower: I've had more prominent photos in Ask Mefi that don't get any hits. For some reason people seem to be interested.

posted by TheophileEscargot 18 October | 08:16

This one.. It's almost disturbing how many people image search "dogwar".

posted by ufez 18 October | 08:42

You want to know? You really, really want to know? Be warned, it ain't pretty.

Okay. It's this one. It is by FAR my most popular picture, even long after that meme seems to have died away on metafilter and I guess, everywhere, if it even existed anywhere else. It's a little disturbing.

The immediate runner up is an xray of my teeth. That's the one where some total stranger helpfully commented that, based on his reading of the xray, I probably had some kind of terrible disease. It's been 3 years and I'm still alive, so, well, okay then.

posted by mygothlaundry 18 October | 09:03

I've got a couple of pictures that I linked to for an AskMe question that have gotten well over a thousand hits, but otherwise the hit count is pretty low, like under 250 at the most. I'm no photographer.

posted by Orange Swan 18 October | 09:14

When my son was in diapers, I'd change him before taking him to daycare and write a "love note" on the diaper in Sharpie to the daycare staff (such is an exemplar). For a while, one or more of these pictures was getting up to 10 hits a day. That adds up.

posted by plinth 18 October | 09:28

I don't get many hits, but the one that's in the hundreds now is Grandma with Beet.

posted by Stewriffic 18 October | 09:32

My most popular somehow got a lot of play with Orkut.Brazil a while back. I tried to sort out why, and as far as I could tell, it was in some email chain of cute children, and was NOT creepy, which was nice.

My second most popular got MOST of it's traffic back when flickr was a MUCH smaller community, still run out of Vancouver. In a way, I think the traffic I got on this funny one is more impressive, because there weren't that many of us flickr users back then.

posted by richat 18 October | 09:45

My fourth-grade class picture has gotten an awful lot of hits.

posted by danf 18 October | 09:45

Definitely this one of a graffito in Barcelona.

posted by initapplette 18 October | 10:10

I just joined Flickr but this calendar shot of my handsome rescue Aussie (he was Mr. January) has already gotten almost 300 hits.

posted by bearwife 18 October | 11:09

Mine is one of our gliders as a baby with 759 views. I'm surprised how popular my Crumar Orchestrator set is, it has 835 views.

posted by youngergirl44 18 October | 11:39

I have some that perfectly cannily popular, and I've found a bunch of me (and my wife) that get a lot of hits. But of all my pictures, this one gets the most traffic, with 885 views.

posted by mrmoonpie 18 October | 11:42

My most popular photo is a brightly colored self-portrait, which I used as my Twitter icon until just last week.

Most viewed is some panties (maybe a bit nsfw) with over 10,000 views. My mother would be so proud.

Most favorited is my Single Snowflake shot that I just love to death.

And most commented on is a record cover self portrait. Which might also be a bit nsfw.

posted by rhapsodie 18 October | 11:44

Uh, the panties link should have been here, because I know you're all dying to add to the view count on that one.

posted by rhapsodie 18 October | 11:48

≡ Click to see image ≡
The kitten I found under a dumpster.

posted by arse_hat 18 October | 12:12

I love that highly colored self portrait, rhapsodie. Gorgeous.

posted by bearwife 18 October | 12:20

This is my most popular photo with over 2000 views:

≡ Click to see image ≡
My Rivendell Atlantis loaded for a bicycle tour I took in 2007

posted by kodama 18 October | 12:30

My most viewed picture (2400+) is a self-portrait of sorts. Seems like it's been hotlinked here & there, hence its disproportionate popularity. Next most viewed (1600+) is a shot of a Venetian carnival mask.

posted by misteraitch 18 October | 14:10

I had to make my most popular photo private. It was a picture of me all sunburned in my bathing suit, not at all provocative, but does show a little bit of cleavage. I have no idea where it got linked but the rapid rise in view numbers really freaked me out.

My second most popular picture is one of me after a haircut, with super short hair. There are a lot of ppl out there with short hair fetishes, apparently.

This picture I took in a bakery is my 3rd most popular.

posted by leesh 18 October | 14:28

I don't update Flickr very much so I don't twitch much photostream activity. My most popular photos are a set I took during flooding in our downtown two summers ago, which I linked to via my local paper, and the most popular of all is this short video of carp swimming up a sloped parking lot.

The most currently popular (3 views today!) is a shot of my bruised shin (it's perfect for an online avatar -- it's got "the angles" ...) after I crashed my bike in May '09. After that, it's this Halloween store display mocking Grant Wood's American Gothic.

posted by dhartung 18 October | 15:37

This one from the summit of Mt. LeConte in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
≡ Click to see image ≡

posted by netbros 18 October | 16:04

My Eye of Horus tattoo photo has 23,697 views. My new (at the time) rat cage has 4,452 views. And an updated rat cage has 1,615 views. Everything else is under 1,000 views. I had no idea that some of my uploads were so popular.

posted by deborah 18 October | 16:15

Man, in retrospect, this probably could have been a Photo Friday. Thanks for the posts, though!

posted by gc 18 October | 16:35

Why my ≡ Click to see image ≡gold laurel-leaf crown has garnered almost 3000 views over time, I do not know.

posted by Lynsey 18 October | 16:50

gc: You're totally right - I'll keep this in mind for a future Photo Friday theme (not too soon though).

posted by youngergirl44 18 October | 17:30

That damn sleeping cat one (not posting it - so sick of it!) I posted to show a friend has had 116,899 views. I didn't even take the stupid thing - it was a forwarded camera phone pic from a friend from some guy she met in a bar.

≡ Click to see image ≡

This one is next in view count - seems mainly to come from yahoo searches total views: 26,565

≡ Click to see image ≡

Tubbs here has had 169 favs. I adore this pic!

≡ Click to see image ≡

This one got posted on Epicute and went crazy on tumblr on some tumblr blogs it's gotten hundreds of notes... just 57 favs on my flickr though.

posted by gomichild 18 October | 20:01

Huh. I was kind of surprised by my stats page. That top one isn't even mine.

Most of my flickr stuff is captions for Caturday. The popular pictures of real objects are this pancake as a head...
≡ Click to see image ≡

and the one I really thought would be number one, my son's Ellie badge...
≡ Click to see image ≡

posted by lysdexic 18 October | 21:44

It's this one, for me, which is the photograph that absolutely proves Rule 34:

≡ Click to see image ≡

I noticed a spike on this photo very early on, coming from a site called pinktoxins.com, which is apparently a bunch of sickos who do nothing but trade photographs of women either in rubber/gas masks or being oxygen-deprived in some way.

Ewwww.

posted by pjern 18 October | 22:26

Heh. Thanks to y'all, with only three more views, the pissing elephant hits 10,000. I'm so . . um. . . well. Not proud, exactly. ;-)

posted by mygothlaundry 18 October | 22:58

I'd like to play, but I've got no one picture that's inexplicably popular. A few weeks ago the view count for the whole photostream spiked for a day at about ten times the usual numbers. I couldn't ferret out what sparked it.

posted by Kronos_to_Earth 19 October | 13:30

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