Stats explosion

Darron

This is an odd month - I rarely get very much traffic reported on my SmugMug stats. Then suddenly I see 1.3 gigs of bandwidth used. Some gallery thumbnail groups show 140 hits per thumb. One single photo at the end of that gallery (not an especially amazing one) had the original pulled 212 times! Why would anyone hot-link to an original - it's too big to fit on a web page.
In another gallery there were 94 hits on the original of a picture of MY CAT?
Anyone else ever notice stats that don't really seem to make sense?
In the interest of bandwidth I simply disabled originals in most galleries for now.

devbobo

Hi Darron,

I myself had this same problem last month in several galleries that had originals turned on. Unfortunately, I didn't have statcounter enabled on my page to determine where the traffic was coming from.

That must be one good-looking cat

Cheers,

David

Richard

Darron wrote:

This is an odd month - I rarely get very much traffic reported on my SmugMug stats. Then suddenly I see 1.3 gigs of bandwidth used. Some gallery thumbnail groups show 140 hits per thumb. One single photo at the end of that gallery (not an especially amazing one) had the original pulled 212 times! Why would anyone hot-link to an original - it's too big to fit on a web page.
In another gallery there were 94 hits on the original of a picture of MY CAT?
Anyone else ever notice stats that don't really seem to make sense?
In the interest of bandwidth I simply disabled originals in most galleries for now.

Some other Web site has probably linked to your gallery. Mostly, this is a good thing, as it means more people are looking at your stuff. If you are seeing some images with more hits than their thumbs, that means that a site has hot-linked to the image itself. This is not a good thing, as you are providing bandwidth to some other site and you may not be getting credit for the images. You can eliminate hot-linking by turning off external links on your gallery customization page. Statcounter can sometimes tell you who is referring traffic to your site, but it will not tell you who is hot-linking.

Cheers,

Darron

Thanks, David & Richard. I recently turned of the "external link" option for a few "problem" galleries. The stats patterns are still a little baffelling. And it seems silly to hot-link to an original if the thing would fill a browser screen (unless the link page resizes it there, which also seems silly).
Cheers,
Darron

cabbey

Darron wrote:

Thanks, David & Richard. I recently turned of the "external link" option for a few "problem" galleries. The stats patterns are still a little baffelling. And it seems silly to hot-link to an original if the thing would fill a browser screen (unless the link page resizes it there, which also seems silly).
Cheers,
Darron

I've seen similar, one of my shots of yellowstone from last summer had something like 400-600 hits per month to the original image, while the entire rest of the gallery had only about 40-60 hits total across all images and sizes for the month. This has repeated for I want to say 4 months or so now? I was just looking to see if it held true for last month, but right now I can't even manage to find the per image stats page anymore!

I've got a sunset shot that's in similar statistics. I can only assume that someone has been passing around the url to the raw -O.jpg (I have external links enabled.) but without raw access to the httpd logs, I'm not sure if there's any reliable way to see where the links are from. (none of the major search engines could find any links to the images in question when I looked a couple months back.)

I've been tempted to replace the image with one that says "hey, someone is deep linking to this image, if you see this, please drop me a note with the url you are seeing it from at this email address..."