1 million views of wildsingapore flickr!

Thanks to the kind support of many people, it was a delight to reach a total of 1 million views on wildsingapore flickr!

From the stats provided by flickr, as of 6 Mar 2011.

Flickr is a great way to share about Singapore's biodiversity! Easily allowing lots of people to learn and care about our wildlife and wild places!

There are currently about 17,000 photos on wildsingapore flickr, which I started in Dec 2006. There is now an average of 1,000 views per day on these photos.

I am often surprised by what people consider interesting and which photos attract the highest views. Today's top viewed photos include a photo of volunteers at Chek Jawa.

The all time top viewed photo is of Eunice the Humungous Reef Worm (who would have thought that a worm with a face that only a mother could love would be so attractive). And Pulau Hantu seems to get lots of views. That's great!

I didn't set out to get a high hit rate, but am glad people are finding the photos and finding them useful.

In fact, this would not have been possible without the kind support of many people who use the photos in their outreach work, presentations and other educational purposes. Among them, I know N. Sivasothi has been a great supporter.

There are probably many many more whom I am unaware of. I'm always delighted to hear that the photos are useful in such efforts! Thank you for using my photos!

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the selection, I'll be glad to hear from you. You can leave a comment on this post or email me at hello@wildsingapore.com

I can't figure out how to make the flickr stats public, though. Sorry about that.

Techie stuff about wildsingapore photos

For those who are curious about wildsingapore flickr photos, here's some technical background on the photos which you might find useful.

The photo selection and treatment on wildsingapore flickr reflects my hope for these photos to be easily found on the internet, and easily downloaded for educational and non-profit purposes. Thus:

• Photos are generally posted for use in presentations: saved at 72dpi, 684 x 504 pixels.
• All photos are tagged with scientific name (phylum, family, genus, species) and location.
• All photos are geotagged
• All photos are in at least one set

Sets are established for broad taxonomic groups, locations and other themes. The sets are grouped in collections, the key ones being

• By location
• Threats to our shores
• and various collections for each phylum 
• and selected high resolution photos for free download

I share a lot of my photos on this flickr group: Encyclopedia of Life (about 2,500 photos). Full list of flickr groups that I subscribe to is here.

More about the photos and how I use flickr

• Most photos are on Singapore's marine life and were taken ABOVE water. Or in very shallow water with sneaky small swimming camera. I don't dive. 
• Besides nice photos of landscape and wildlife, I also try to document the threats to our shores.
• I use the desktop Flickr Uploadr for easy batch tagging and to quickly allocate batches of photos to sets.
• I extensively use "Organise & Create" to geotag and quickly share batches of photos with groups.

I can't say that I know a lot about how to use flickr, but I have struggled to find out a fair bit. If you have any questions about flickr, do leave a comment on this post or email me at hello@wildsingapore.com and I'll try my best to reply.

I do provide high resolution photos upon request. Please give me at least two week's notice as I need to set aside time to attend  to your request (there is often already a queue of pending requests at any one time). And I also need your photo specifications. More information about photo requests here.

I'm always excited to share photos about Singapore's amazing biodiversity! And 1 million views sure made my day! Thank you!