flickrate is a different way to look at the statistics for your flickr photos. On their statistics page, flickr tracks the top ten photos in terms of all time cumulative views. But after a while, this list rarely changes, because older photos keep accumulating views and newer ones can never catch up. I was interested in which of my more recent photos were doing well, so I wrote flickrate. This program will show you which of your photos are getting more views per day, averaged over the time since they were posted, mixed in with the ones with the all time highest views. This should allow recent photos a chance, but still allow the all-time blockusters to show up.
flickrate is a command line application. If you're not comfortable with the command line, I'm afraid you're not going to find it terribly easy to use. If the shell prompt doesn't intimidate you, then read on!
To use flickrate, you'll need an API key and secret from flickr. You can get them
here. The first time
you use it, you'll have to supply these to flickrate using the -key and -secret
flags. After that, flickrate will remember them, so you don't have to
type them every time. If you want to check photos that are private, or that
are not visible in safe mode, you'll need to authorize flickrate. Do this by
providing the -user flag with your user name. Again, flickrate will remember the login,
so you don't have to do it every time.
Once all of that red tape is out of the way, simply run flickrate with the
name of the user whose stats you want to check. If you've authorized
flickrate with the -user parameter, then by default your own photos
will be checked. Use the -h or --help flags to see what all of the
options are. The most useful ones are:
-mindayssets the minimum age for photos to be considered. Very recently posted photos will have a much higher average view rate, so they will distort the results. By default flickrate will only consider photos at least 60 days old.-maxdayssets the maximum age for photos to be considered. If you're only interested in photos posted within the last year, for instance, you could provide the value 365. By default, flickrate does not impose a maximum age.-minviewssets the minimum number of views a photo must have to be considered. By default this is 1000.-ocauses flickrate to open the listed photos in a browser window, in addition to lising the URLs.
For operations that require opening a browser, flickrate supports Windows 10
and Mac, and maybe Linux. (My test environment for Linux is not useful for
this. In theory the code works in a gnome environment. Please let me know!)
Things that require a browser are the -o flag and the -user flag.
If you aren't using either of those,
flickrate should run properly on any platform that supports go.