Image last (embedded) used time?

Ferguson

I tend to link images in forums all over the place.

I also have a lot of images on Smugmug, and am thinking of doing some cleanup. More precisely am thinking of cleaning up my Lightroom master catalog, which is linked to Smugmug.

So let's say I had 100 images from a basketball game in 2012, and I decide at least 50 of them do not merit keeping for whatever reason. It's easy to delete them from SM and LR at the same time. But...

If I linked to them they vanish as well from some web site somewhere.

What I'd like to know is the last time someone viewed that image while NOT on Smugmug, i.e. from a direct link to it.

Does SM track this? Is it anywhere that might be available, in the API for example, or can I find it after a sync with the LR plugin in the SQL database?

I'm not asking for automation here, just whether the information could be found and accessed if it existed, perfectly willing to script something.

An alternative of course is delete from lightroom and leave on Smugmug, and I realize your storage is "unlimited" but that just seems a waste. Besides, if I do delete it, I do not want someone asking for access to it a few years from now and me not having it, would rather it disappear.

Bea

We track views from third party websites, although there are no details available for that hit. So while we count the hit as a photo view, even the photo is displayed in a third party forum, that hit won't show any details like when someone viewed the photo in that forum. That information is not available via SmugMug/Stats.

Ferguson

@Bea said:
We track views from third party websites, although there are no details available for that hit. So while we count the hit as a photo view, even the photo is displayed in a third party forum, that hit won't show any details like when someone viewed the photo in that forum. That information is not available via SmugMug/Stats.

Thanks. That's actually a tad confusing, as if I go to the statistics page for referers, I see lots of links from sites where I post embedded shots, but not links to my gallery (basically photos of a thing, like a device, on non-photo forums). So it LOOKS like embedded links, e.g. to the jpg itself, are being counted?

tomnovy

Hey Ferguson. I am not entirely sure what you mean - could you please clarify? Embedded photos will show counts in the stats section of your website - when a view of the page, where the photo is located occurs.

Ferguson

@tomnovy I think I misread Bea's note the first time, apologies.

My question is whether you know the difference in an image displayed inside a Smugmug gallery, and an image displayed otherwise e.g. from an embedded link. And it appears the answer is "no"?

tomnovy

@Ferguson there is no possibility to tell where from specific views are coming. You may try using google analytics or statcounter and see if those platforms will give you more insight to your incomming traffic.

Allen

Smugmug redirects all embedded photos to photos.smugmug.com so there is no hint of your site or where any embedded photo comes from other then Smugmug.

Ferguson

@Allen, I'm aware, but that's more about how the servers on that end see the links to the images. For this purpose I really don't care if they see it as smugmug or my domain.

@Tomnovy, unfortunately all those tools rely (so far as I know) on embedded code in the web page to track that web page. Individual images become IMG tags, which load directly from your server or CDN, so only the user agent and your server/CDN know about the request.

I was hoping that the internal connection from galleries somehow gave different URI's that your own servers might track differently for in-gallery (e.g. in lightboox or collage or whatever) vs direct JPG access URL's. That they do not is not really surprising, but hope springs eternal.