Dominic wrote:So why do some photo's get lots of views and others never get viewed. (?)
various reasons -- dealing with very different viewing figures for pics on the same page... specifically, i think the viewed figure refers to 2 different things -- if the pic is just a standard embedded pic as part of the post, then it will get viewed every time the page is accessed (so some pics appear to have been viewed 150+ times) -- however if the pic is a thumbnail (small version of the pic) which when clicked on links to a standalone full size image, then "viewed" will refer to how many times the full size image has been viewed (maybe once or twice) -- at least i think that's one of the reasons (??)
or/also if the same image is used on (or linked to) from another page (including pages where it no longer appears) then those 'views' would alse be included
then there's general reasons -
anyone and anything can view the forums -- many of the requests to view pages will be from bots (robot programs) -- the commonest bots are search engine spiders which constantly travel from link to link indexing files (the web page itself + the image and sound files that the web page calls up) -- there's also lots of other bots, some friendly, and some not so friendly -- (a good stats program will analyse the raw traffic logs for a site and be able to sort out the better known bots from the humans visitors)
once an image is indexed by a search engine, then it may be looked up using an image search -- when searching for images (eg using Google Image Search) some images will appear higher than others in the results for various reasons (eg it's position in the search results will partly depend on the accompanying text in the post it appears in, the web page 'title tag', how many other pages are linking to the webpage/website that the image is being used on etc) -- obviously pics that come at the top of the search results are more likely to be viewed than those which appear on the 70th page of search engine results -- and of course the filename of the image itself will also be relevant -- so an image which has a filename relevant to the contents of the pic (eg cabbage_patch_twickenham.jpg) is more likely to be found by people using the search engines than an image with a random name (eg yidfhjkvua_037.jpg)
generally a pub is going to be of more interest to people than someone's cat -- in other words, there's going to be more people doing a general search on Google for "Cabbage Patch Twickenham" than there will be for "pussiepussydumpkins" (one of half a dozen possible spellings), a moggy that belonged to some guy 30 years ago with long hair who wore jeans whose name no one can rememeber)
it's also possible that some of the images are being directly linked to from other people's web pages -- so every time anyone visits the other person's web page, one or more of the images called up by his web page are actually coming from our web space at grosvenor-road.co.uk
some of these things can be controlled from within the settings for the web account and/or the forum software, but unless its causing problems it's not worth worrying about -- generally anything to do with stats and logs and viewing figures is a can of worms, and should always be taken with a pinch of salt, or at least some sort of flavouring to try and make them more palatable
