What's your most popular photo?

Regular readers will know I like photography, and take loads of pictures. Some make their way here, but many can be found on my social media streams, Facebook, Twitter (@statto1927), Instagram (simon_hiscocks) or my cloud service of choice, Flickr which I use both as a backup but also searchable archive, both for personal and public consumption. 

I can flick (pun intended) through these at my leisure - many of these, and increasingly so, I've given a title and occasional a description. Whilst this works for me (after all, I know what the photo is as I took it), it's interesting to see what people search fro on Flickr. 

On this platform, my two most viewed photos are titled "The road to Papagayo beach" and "One of the Papagayo beaches" with almost 1,700 and just over 1,600 views respectively. These were taken in Lanzarote in early 202 (before the pandemic hit). They're miles ahead of the next highest viewed photo neatly titled "Centre Parcs" with a meagre 1,256 views at the time of writing.

Why are my photos of the road to Papagayo beach so interesting for people? Surely it's not because it's a great photo. It isn't as you can see here, it's a photo of a rubbly road taken out of an electric VW Golf back seat!

The road to Papagayo beach

No, I rather suspect that why this sits at the top of my viewed list is because Papagayo beach is knows as a nudist beach, and people weren't actually searching for a photo of a road, but rather something a little more raw as it were...

Even the one of the Papagayo beach itself wouldn't help them - it's a photo of a deserted beach!

One of the Papagayo beaches

The 3rd most viewed photo on my Flickr account is titled "Centre Parcs". Now I'm sure there are many people who want to, or have visited one of the Centre Parcs sites and want to see a little more about the place. However, this particular photo is a donkeys years old (2008) out of focus, low resolution photo of a road in Longleat Centre Parcs taken on a Palm Centro device (an early smartphone) with a whopping 1.3 megapixel camera. Consequently, it's neither interesting, nor an image of any reputable quality. However, it's been viewed over 1,200 times. If I had entitled it "A boring blurry image of some tarmac in Center Parcs"I doubt it would have got the same exposure.

The 3rd most popular photo I've uploaded!

Finally, just sneaking into the top ten most viewed is this beauty of my foot after a knee op I had in 2008.

No. 10 in the all time viewed list

I'm not entirely sure why I wrote this post other than as an observation that of all the decent photo's I've take over the years most of my all time viewed photos are pretty rubbish ones that people have come across inadvertently whilst searching for something else entirely. Maybe I need to get better at titling and tagging....