I heart Flickr a lot, but I’ve talked about some of it’s shortcomings before. Another one is that it’s really hard to track how people come across your photos. Anyone with a blog knows the thrill of digging through your server’s logs and seeing what search queries led them to your riveting musings. Measure Map and Google Analytics are big hits for just that reason.
Since there’s no built in support in Flickr for this type of tracking, I came up with a hack. I can’t see how other people came across my images, but I can let them know how I came across theirs. When I leave a comment, I just insert a link to the page I came from. Mind you, I don’t always do this, just when it seems notable.
Flickr Referral Bookmarklet (Right-click and choose “Add to Favorites…”)
Knowing full well that its annoying to copy and paste the URL of the previous page, and that other poeple won’t go along with annoying routines like that, I wrote a bookmarklet that inserts it for you.
The bookmarklet goes into your favorites, just like any other, but clicking on it doesn’t bring you to a new page, it adds text to the comment box. Specifically, the URL of the page that brought you to the picture you are currently viewing. This works for referring pages outside Flickr too, like Google searches or blog posts.
My hope is that people start using this and it spreads like wildfire, and Ibecome hailed as a visionary. But I’ll settle for seeing it in some comments, though.
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