14 DAY TRIAL // Panoramio doesn't really get the attention it deserves from Google, but it's a crucial service for the company's online mapping service. The site has a rather dedicated community around it and Google is now providing them with a statistics tool to enable them to track how popular their photos are.
"Photos uploaded to Panoramio show up on its website, as well as other places such as Google Earth and Google Maps," Gyuri Dorko, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.
"We’re excited to announce that detailed statistics are now available to users directly within their Panoramio account," he announced.
"Think of Panoramio Stats as a photo-specific version of Google Analytics for Panoramio - in other words, a powerful web analytics tool that helps you measure the performance of your photos. With this new feature, you can track the sites from which your photos have been viewed in visually appealing and intuitive reports," he explained.
The stats feature is now live for every photo on Panoramio. The interesting thing is that you can see the statistics for every image out there, not just the ones you uploaded. This inside look can be really useful in determining what are the most popular photos on the site as well as where you 'rank.'
The detailed stats go back only 30 days and there doesn't seem to be a way to customize the time frame. It makes sense that there aren't that many stats for the period before the feature launched, but going forward, more granular controls would probably be useful.
You do, however, get the total number of views since the photo has been uploaded. The data is also broken down based on sources, you can see just how many users are coming from Panoramio, Google Earth and Maps or the Widget API.