All this thread show is you can't please everyone......make some changes to suit some members, and other members will be annoyed. It will never be prefect for every member. No site ever is.
I agree nothing is ever perfect, but the whole point of posting photos to share with others is to see how popular a photo can be/viewed. We all know that's one of the main reasons to do so. Nobody can deny this.
The point is if "hits" on photos are going to be so low as they tend to be now, folk's interest in the site will simply wane and postings will dry up. The site's lifeblood is it's photo contributions, without that it dies.
I know of members that no longer post photos for this very reason. Hence my suggestion to go back to the old site's way of setting up photos so they CAN be viewed as opposed to the current way in which you just look at them without clicking to go bigger.
Hi Richard,
It is probably human nature that people want to know how many times a shot of which the poster thinks that it deserves to be viewed actually gets a "hit", meaning that the thumbnail has been opened. Now I think it is a bit perverse that we should reduce the quality of the thumbnails, just to create more hits, while at the same time they may have been looked at, but those views have not been recorded. It may well be the case that the number of views (including the thumbnail views) currently exceeds what was recorded in the previous system, but the number of people who want to open the thumbnail, let alone those who want to see the shot at full size, is less. Does that mean that the shot has been receiving less appreciation? I don't think so, as even those infamously popular B&W shots get far less actual hits than they received in the past.
So what is actually needed is a change in expectations of how many hits you may generate, and if that number is lower, people may get disappointed, but they should get over it, and keep on posting.
There may be another aspect too, and that is that the number of daily uploaded shots is quite large, so attractive shots (shots that attract hits that is) may disappear from immediate view much quicker, inevitably resulting in less hits. If the number of posted shots would be around 50 per day or so, the number of individual hits would probably significantly higher, but I hope nobody will be suggesting to set a maximum to the number of new shots, just to increase hits....