Serola

Today I read an interesting article called My most viewed photos at Shoot and Tell by Deb Platt. It made me remember the study made at MIT labs to find out what makes an image memorable:

In general, images with people in them are the most memorable, followed by images of human-scale space — such as the produce aisle of a grocery store — and close-ups of objects.

Although, being memorable does not necessarily mean something is popular. But being memorable surely must make a picture more interesting.

But popularity is a strange thing, and obviously our behavior can be affected with something like news and advertisements. What has very long interested me is how some pictures here around MyOpera just becomes more popular and viewed than others. And what really do make a change is to become featured on MyOpera photos and viewed on MyOpera news and margin of that same page.

For example this Orlando's featured picture I would not call as memorable, based on MIT lab study, and yet it has received incredible over 10,000 views in rather short period of time. Although, there is a human figure in the picture

For my surprise I also noticed my own old 365 album being featured at some point. No idea when it has happened. However, the second photo on that album has now received amazing over 25,000 views. It is interesting because it means people have actually first opened the album from featured photos page and then opened that particular photo. Although, that explains 10,000 visits only. That particular image was also earlier mentioned on MyOpera news, and at that time the picture got also over 13,000 views in short time.

I noticed MyOpera has also added a feature that gives an author a possibility to remove her/his album from featured photos. There seem to be 'remove' link on my picture, which very likely works that way, aka removes the album form featured photos. Nice to know, in case I want to do so

Then there's another way to become famous, which has puzzled me for awhile. Ever noticed the section of popular photographers? It used to puzzle me a lot. Why some accounts become acknowledged like this? Then I noticed the number of subscriptions mentioned on MyOpera photos page. Those subscriptions are for account's albums main page, like in case of P2O2. I realized P2O2 has received high status on popular photographers in very short time. And that has happened partly because he creates new albums quite often. Of course the pictures also must be interesting, but key to that popularity seem to be in number of albums opened. Whether some of those accounts acknowledged as popular photographers are really photographers, is a different issue