13 Million Star Photo Views šŸ¤Æ

Connections & celebrations
21

Awesomeā€¦! Many congratulations :clap:

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22

Huge Congrats on this number @JustJake Itā€™s a great photo. Hope it continues to shine.

23

Same here mateā€¦ same here.
I suspect it changes in the ā€œbackgroundā€ but it does not help when the current views groawth are a fraction of the previous method.

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24

@JustJake @WilfriedB after many mentions by a few of you, this finally convinced me to try a Takeout. At this point Iā€™m NOT impressed. Seems quite a tedious process, and my computer also crashed while attempting to extract the downloaded Zip files. I suspect Iā€™ll be ready for bed before this is all done. Will happily read any tips or tricks by you guys when I awake tomorrow. Otherwise, this will perhaps be my second and last attempt at Takeout. First attempt was many years ago for some other reason, and I was never going to do it again.

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25

Congratulations @JustJake :bouquet:

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26

@JustJake Congratulations.

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27

Thank you @JustJake for answering my query in detail.

Much thankful.

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28

@tony_b you are correct and I donā€™t have additional tips or tricks to share. While I was in Italy, I needed to start download and unzip remotely on my PC which stays in Germany, because the Internet connection is too unstable at the place, where we stay in Italy and even the download crashed several times. For that it might help, to split the file in smaller pieces (an option in the request), but this max download and unzip even more tedious.

Nevertheless, I appreciate having it done it leas once, to create a base to understand, which images I uploaded and exactly when(!). For newer posts, I keep track of that manually, but might use the Takeouts for photos maybe once a year and for reviews sporadically (this is much easier).

The other thing is: Unless, you donā€™t have the original images anymore, 99.9..% of the takeout is useless, but the remaining less than 1% in the form of JSON text files contain the view, as well as the date and time the photo was taken and uploaded. A little script could be written easily to convert this into a CSV file to be loaded into a spreadsheet to provide a better overview. If you donā€™t need the original image files, a Python script would also be able to read the zipped file, but if I remember correctly, there was a size limitation with that.

Interesting is still the difference between what we see under My Contributions and in the Takeouts. About a third of the views under Contributions have higher numbers than the takeouts. Some with significant differences.

For those who donā€™t know, how to request a takeout, I described it here more than a year ago (for a different purpose).

CC @JustJake

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29

Itā€™s a astronomical number, congratulations @JustJake

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30

:flushed_face: Oh man, sorry for suggesting a headache! It was one of those topics that was floating around and I thought it might be applicable here.

Well, thatā€™s the opposite of what I thought Tony would be seeing, since his Star views have not changed in a year! Thank you for jumping in Wil, I was only able to remember what you did, not how you did it.

31

Thank you, Sir. I agree! The bar is really high for what can be achieved, like Svenā€™s 250,000,000 Star Views. :exploding_head:

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32

Thank you, @TerryPG. Check out that new LG Canada badge! Right on!

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33

Not necessarily, @JustJake. What I said above means most of the photo, including my star photo, show more views in the JSON compared to My Contributions. For the star photo, I can clearly understand from the takeouts that the increase since February 2024 is less than 1% of its previous total number. I believe, @tony_b mentioned something very similar for his star photo a while ago.

This means both photos did gain an extremely high number of views for a limited time and then dropped dramatically. Very likely, we will never see any increase on My Contributions, but do see a little bit in the takeouts. Is it worth the effort to request takeouts regularly? I doubt!

But one more thing, @JustJake:
In case someone lost a lokal backup of photos, via the takeout, you can get at least those back, you posted Maps. I was surprised, the image files are exactly 100% the same as uploaded.

34

Brilliant @JustJake
Congratulations on hitting 13 million photo views! Your dedication and eye for detail are clearly making a difference in the Local Guides community. Well done!

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35

Congratulations Jake.

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36

Thank you very much!

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37

It is surprising that so much storage is used to hold the original file. Morten had pointed out long ago that if you report an image, the resulting page also provides a full-sized copy for download. So, they seem to have some reason to keep the huge files.

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38

Not only that, if you open your photo in full screen and download, youā€™ll get the original file. There is now need to pretend a report.

39

Congratulations :tada::tada::tada::bouquet: keep going

40

No apology needed @JustJake. This suggestion has been floating around for a while and I refused to do it, until now Iā€™m giving it a try, of my own free will. If or when I reach my frustration threshold, Iā€™ll give up, but donā€™t blame yourself for persuading me. :grin:

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