Update: Top 10 Most Viewed Pictures

It has been a while since I reviewed the most viewed pictures on my Flickr Photostream, so I thought I'd revisit the list, see if anything has changed and - if so - if I could see or deduce anything about why that might be.

To re-set, for several years running the most viewed pictures of the nearly 3,000 pictures I've taken and posted to Flickr were alternatively my close-up shot of the Taj Mahal and naked cyclists at the annual Seattle areas Fremont Solstice Festival. After that, it has usually been a combination of pictures I took when we visited Vietnam in 2006 and a few of military vehicles or historic sites I've taken around the world.

As of August 13, 2013, below is the list of most viewed. You'll see there are some changes and some similarities. Counting down from the tenth most viewed to the single most viewed...

10. A Naked Bigfoot on a Bike at the Fremont Solstice Parade
9. Room Inside Peles Castle (in Romania)
8. Poenari Castle (in Romania)
7. Former South Vietnam Capital Building in Ho Chi Minh City
6. Aircraft Carrier Yorktown
5. Naked Bike Riders in the 2012 Fremont Solstice Parade
4. Pyramids of Giza and Camels
3. Naked Bike Riders in the Fremont Solstice Parade
2. Close Up of Taj Mahal Detail
1. Spiral Staircase in Peles Castle (in Romania)

My Most Viewed Picture

OK, so you see that three of the top 10 are still, in fact, naked bike riders. Oh how people like to look at naked people online...even if in this case they are all painted up. But, I will note that even if you add the views for these three pictures, they still don't out-do the #1 picture in terms of total views. Close, but not quite.

Also, you'll see a few pictures from Romania now in the mix, and in fact one of them is the most viewed. I chalk this up to Pinterist. Well, that and good photography by me of course!

I started a minimal Pinterest board a while ago as just another place to post my pictures online. Among the sets I created was one featuring shots I took when we visited Romania in 2011.

One of those pictures, the carved wooden staircase inside Peles castle, caught on there like wildfire and was re-pinned LIKE CRAZY for a long time over the last year or so. Why? Who knows. It is interesting and a good example of a spiral staircase. Perhaps it is an inspiration to people thinking about putting a spiral staircase in their homes...even if not close to the elaborate nature of the one I photographed. But that's as far as I can tell. In any case, that Pinterest activity spurred views of that same picture on my Photostream - propelling it past all the other previously most viewed.

The other Romania pictures are castle-related too, so there may be something about interest in "real" castles and what they look like. This is reinforced by the fact that five of the next ten most viewed (11-20) are also pictures of castles in Romania.

After naked bike riders and Romanian castles, the top 10 most viewed is rounded out by a shot of the Great Pyramids in Egypt, a building in Vietnam and an U.S. aircraft carrier. And you can see that the Taj detail picture is still viewed a lot.

To me, the list as of August 2013 seems very similar to previous time frames with the exception of views of the Romanian pictures fed by Pinterest.