According to the powers that be at Flickr, you have until June 1, 2010, 12:00 PM PDT to get your historical referrer-log data, if you are a Pro member and are interested. You can download it as CSVs from the bottom of your stats page.

Apparently it is “not sustainable” to keep the data available forever. I suspect this translates to ‘it’s really expensive and only 0.001% of our users actually care or are even aware of it.’ In the future, they will be providing access to 28 days worth of data via the API, but probably nothing beyond that.

I wasn’t even aware that this feature existed until I saw the notice that it was going away, and although their reasons for terminating it are understandable, it is surprisingly interesting data. My strong recommendation is that, if you’re a Pro member and you have a few megabytes of disk and transfer to spare, you might as well take thirty seconds and download them.

Note to anyone thinking of being clever and using curl or wget to batch-download all the files at once: don’t bother, it’s really not worth your time. (Trust me on this, I looked into it.) You’d have to authenticate using Flickr’s API and it’s guaranteed to take longer than just pointing your browser’s download-destination folder to some appropriate place and Alt-clicking on them.

If you download your logs as CSV files — and really why wouldn’t you? Excel gives you no advantage here — you can use this small Python script I wrote to dump them into a SQLite database. The script requires Python 2.5 or later (or possibly an older version with the appropriate PySQLite add-on package, but I haven’t tested that and probably won’t). Bug reports and enhancements are welcomed although it’s not meant to be pretty, since it won’t be of much use to anyone after June 1. The schema should be obvious just from looking at the script; it’s two tables — one for daily and the other for weekly data — and the columns in the CSVs are all carried over into the DB. There’s no date conversion or other fancy stuff.

What you do with it once you get it there is your business; I haven’t really decided what, if anything, to do with it, but it seemed like having everything in a couple of DB tables was a lot more convenient, whatever I might decide to do with it, than having it in dozens of CSVs. (Do keep the CSVs though. They’re small and there’s no good reason not to.) If you have any suggestions of interesting things to do with or ways to analyze the data, let me know by SDF email or in the comments.

Maybe once they get the API access set up, I’ll write something to grab new stats and shove them into the same SQLite DB on top of the existing records. It would only have to run once a month or so to stay on top of the feed, which isn’t that bad.

So I finally got around to taking that trip to Yellowstone that I was talking about back in May. Rather than going in late August 2009, as I had planned, I actually ended up going last month (that’d be March, 2010). For those of you not familiar with weather in the Northern Hemisphere, that meant going in what amounts to the dead of winter, instead of the height of summer — and as far as I’m concerned, it was the best thing that could have happened to the trip.

While we didn’t have the Park to ourselves, exactly, we were much closer to it than we would have been in August. And wildlife was much easier to spot as well. Although I didn’t snag a shot of one of Yellowstone’s coveted wolves, I did get some nice images of the local bison, coyotes, birds, etc. All in all, a great trip, and I highly recommend a winter excursion to the park for anyone who hasn’t done it already. You won’t be disappointed.

But that’s not my purpose here. In my earlier post I made soem guesses about what I thought my photography habit was going to set me back, in terms of consumables (in the form of storage), for the trip. In that post I had guessed that I’d fill two 4GB cards, which I thought would be fine for my relatively low-resolution (by 2010 standards) DSLR.

As it turned out, I was a little low.

Over the course of nine days, I took a total of 2,299 frames, equivalent to about 64 rolls of 135, and consuming just under 20GB. Just sorting through then and making a ‘first cut’ is a project in itself.

Part of the reason I ended up taking so many frames (and I’m using the word “frames” rather than “images” carefully here) is because I had brought my laptop along with me on the trip and as a result knew I didn’t have any reason to conserve storage space. The limiting factor on my shooting wasn’t storage, but instead camera batteries. With a 4GB and 8GB card, I could easily shoot all day and then dump the contents to my laptop at night for storage and immediate backup to a DVD.

This led to an immediate change in my shooting style that I never would have made, if I’d been shooting film or even using the digital without the hundreds of gigabytes of disk storage that the laptop represented: I turned on three-frame, +/-0.5 EV bracket mode on the first day and never turned it off. That’s something I’ve never felt rich enough to do on my film Maxxum.

So those 2299 frames really represent something like 800 images (I did take a few without bracket mode, so that’s a low estimate), much closer to my initial estimate of 20 or so 35mm rolls worth. It’s just that, rather than only having one frame for each image, with the digital I have two “insurance” frames, in case my judgement of the light was a bit off or I just decide that slightly lighter or darker is preferable. Although not earth-shattering by any means, I do think the bracketing saved a few marginal images that otherwise would have been garbage if I’d only had the “center” one. And that’s enough to make me a pretty happy photographer.