Top ten

As regular readers of this blog will know, the Archives has been gradually digitizing its photographic collection over recent years and putting them online through the Flickr photo-sharing website. This week, we passed a significant milestone, with over 100,000 online views of those photographs.

To mark this achievement, here are a few more Flickr-related statistics:

Number of photographs: 1,189
Number of sets: 42
Number of collections: 5
Number of tags: 341
Views of most popular image: 545
Views of least popular image: 7*
Number of times photos have been ‘favorited’: 222
Number of comments on photos: 87

The collage at the top of this post is a compilation of the ten most popular photographs on Flickr, which between them have been viewed over 3,500 times.

It’s also interesting to see the geographical spread of the Archives’ photographs: the image below shows how far across the globe the subject matter of our photographs is scattered.

Geographic range of Deseronto Archives photos

The ‘most interesting’ photograph (by Flickr’s measure) is one of these far-flung ones – a picture of the Eaton’s store in a very quiet Portage Avenue in Winnipeg, Manitoba, taken in 1907 by Harold McMurrich Rathbun.

HMR1-09-38

Four years ago, the only way of seeing most of these photographs was by coming to visit Deseronto Archives in person. Some of them belong to individuals and were not available to public view at all. We’re delighted that they are now accessible to a much larger public.

*It should be pointed out that this image has only been on Flickr for a week or two. It’s not unpopular because it’s spectacularly unattractive or boring. Go on, go and have a look at it, just to give it a boost…