Questions abouts stats & who can view

Painterskip

Hi, there

I just recently migrated my 'stuff' from the old SmugMug to the new and while it took me awhile, I like it much better than t he old version when it comes to organizing. It's still kinda wierd but much better...

Anyway, most of my images are either pics taken at my daughters' dance school events or family photos. The dance school is for kids (my daughter is now close to 14), so I had traditionally password protected the galleries (or folders or whatever SM decides to call them). That worked well, I think.
But those photos were also the originals and I'm having second thoughts about even trying to bother to sell any...

So this time, after our last competition, I uploaded about 800 photos into one new folder that had 16 galleries inside. I uploaded email sized images this time and did not password protect.

It's been one week since I started send them (took me 4 days to edit and upload). So far it appears that my photos (all of them) have been viewed almost 27 thousand times, just this week.

Here's what is odd about that...
The most popular gallery is the first and that makes sense to me....over 4k views.
Second most popular is a family event from 2 years ago. No one in my immediate family has been viewing them.
The sixth most popular gallery is also family stuff and specifically, my daughters 10th birthday party. Also odd. Some of those individual photos were viewed 10 or more times.

I think that possibly every time even the thumbnails are viewed, it counts. So that gives a false reading, IF that's correct.

What I want to now is that if a gallery is made public but has no keywords assigned, are other people finding it and finding it so fast? By that I mean, people that I'd rather NOT be viewing the gallery.

I figured that by my experience in searching for interesting photos on SmugMug, that there as so many, it's like finding a needle in a haystack.

Hopefully I've explained myself correctly. I'm just a little concerned.
Thanks in advance.

Teach

Hi

It looks like the link to your site has been shared somewhere and many people are viewing the site and it also appears they are viewing the most popular galleries multiple times. Have you linked to your site or specific galleries on Facebook or blogs recently? If so that could count for the multitude of visitors viewing your site.

thenickdude

If your gallery is Public (not set to Unlisted in the settings), has no password, and you haven't fiddled with the search settings, it will appear on Google Image Search results (which you can see here).

Painterskip

Thanks
Thanks for the replies. I never thought about doing a Google search for my SmugMug site (duh). Although, I'm curious as to why the 'family' gallery would be there, or is it because it was indexed?

As I mentioned, I had previously password protected the dance galleries but the more I thought about it, it seemed to be only a somewhat mild deterrent against people viewing that have no business viewing. I say t hat because even though you might have a gallery that's password protected, we have no way of keeping anyone knowing the password from posting it to say...FaceBook. And that's what happened last time. The kids posted the link and password to FB as well as Twitter and Instagram, I think. So, friends of friends of friends could get in.

And yes, someone did post the link to my main site on FaceBook. I was simply surprised at the number of views generated in one week and also by what galleries they viewed.

It's a great lesson in how to promote, I suppose:-)