Increase your Flickr Views - Evil ways

I recently blogged on some ways to Increase Flickr visits. That blog was full of advice to help boost your views and have fun on Flickr.

There are also, however, some less ethical ways that I've seen to boost views. Below I list a few that I've seen used. I'm not endorsing them. I'm just letting your know.

1. Using Stealther
Flickr tracks views with cookies (a little note left on your computer). If you have Firefox
, add the Stealther add-on and activate it. Stealther prevents Flickr leaving a cookie. Consequently, each time you click refresh on a picture, you add a view to the view count. Is this only lying to yourself? Yes. Does it increase your official visit count? Yes. Does it make you a bad person? Probably.

2. Comment and Award Groups
You can pile up visits by adding your picture to reciprocal comment and reward groups. The ones with all the flashing graphics, that ask you to paste some HTML into every comment your post. The best for getting views are those that use automatic sweepers to punish people who dump-and-run. Try FlickrHearts, MusicToMyEyes and A+++ to start off with. There are loads more - an easy way to find them is to look at the comments of some other participants in these groups and see where the views are coming from. The more comments they require, the more visits you are likely to get (but the more effort involved).

More ethical are the Group that only require one comment for each post - perhaps the most active of these is The World Through My Eyes. As they only require one comment to be made, the quality of your picture is likely to be a stronger driver of visits that the Award Groups.

3. Using Flickr API
Flickr allows others to build websites that interact with Flickr. Some of these can boost your views.

A potentially evil way to boost the views is through Dackr. Dackr has some great qualities including the ability to post comments to many people from one page. For example, go to the Explore page and select Comments. You will be presented with all the currently explored pictures on Flickr with a comment box next to each.

Flickr prevents heavy spamming from API by limiting posts to 10 comments every 15 minutes. Which sounds limiting. But actually, that's 40 comments an hour or 960 every 24 hours. 960 comments will lead to a helluva lot of return comments. Dackr stresses that you should use it to leave valuable comments. I wholeheatedly agree with that one. If you are after view, the better your comments, the more likely that you'll get a response!

4. Make a few too many contacts

When you add someone as a contact, often they will a. visit your photostream and b. add you as a contact in return, c. view / comment on your shots. It might be tempting to go on a contact frenzy, adding as many as you can. This would give you a short-term boost to views from the above reasons, but also, provided your pictures capture they eye of your new contacts, you will get further views as time goes on. This is because pictures from your Flickr contacts are displayed on each Flickr-ites home page and on tools like FlickrFox.


There are many other ways to solicit views that veer towards unethical. My advice is to focus on your pictures above all else. Are views really so valuable?



Feel free to visit my photostream on Flickr - Doug88888 - comments and messages are always appreciated.

Here are some of my recent articles on Flickr
Flickr Tagging - top tips
Least Interesting on Flickr
Flickr on FriendFeed
Flickr Best Friends
Flickr Fave's Game
Flickr Enhancements - Best Tools Available
How to Increase your Flickr views