I don't know how many people follow my occasional documentation of the posting stats for PBase (last seen in my shot of 26 Sep 2023), but lest there be any, here we are for the end of 2024.

In the 2023 image, which I updated in April 2024, I mentioned that the annual result for 2023 was a drop in images posted of 5.05% (or 51,617 fewer images) year on year. At that time the full year projection was for a drop of 15.36% for 2024.

The 2024 drop was in fact much lower suggesting that there is an upswing in posting over the northern summer, which makes sense. 2024 saw a drop of 66,877 images posted on the site, for a year on year fall of "only" 6.89%.

As at the time of writing the projection for 2025 is a decrease of 24%, but as I said based on history that will reduce significantly over the northern summer. I'd be astonished if the 2025 fall was any less than 5% (I'd bet 5 to 10%), but it should reduce somewhat.

Until this week I planned to do something that would offset that in some small way. I WAS going to reload my entire gallery of shots from the soccer match that I attended in Perth last May because "mysteriously" those shots don't appear in the sample images for the OM-5. (The before and after match shots do, but none of the during ones do.) They used to. They don't now. I suspect that the admins pulled the shots from the index because at the time they made up the majority of the OM-5 sample shots. Whether they thought that there were too many on the same theme, or whether it was specifically because they were MY shots making up the majority, I couldn't say. When I noticed that (there are 61 shots in my gallery, and at the time there were only 49 sample images for the OM-5, so clearly the math wasn't mathing), I raised a support ticket about it. With two follow ups, all of which were arrogantly and rudely and unprofessionally ignored. I was planning to do a fresh reload of the images as a "stuff you" to Slug and / or Emily, but after what happened this week I really can't be bothered, especially since I'd have to redo the descriptions anyway as I explain below. All I'd do is help their dying site out with an extra 61 images to give it even the vaguest air of animation.

At the time of writing my most recently posted 2025 PAD was "250125_061740_2223 Virtual Neutral Density; An Austinmer Sunrise (Sat 25 Jan 25)". How many people viewed it on PBase? Three. How many comments? One. How many votes? Who knows, there's zero transparency about that but obviously "not more than 3".

But now let's see what happened when I posted the same image on Flickr. How many people viewed it? 3,378 and counting in about 24 hours. How many people favourited it? 121. Most of those people, I've never come across before. Now granted, that was an extraordinary (and, coming from a PBase background where "graveyard at midnight" is the activity norm) overwhelming number of people. I was gratified, more than gratified by the attention, but more than a little shocked. It came from the fact that the photo ended up in the "Explore Popular Images" page of Flickr after racking up a few "favourite" tags, so that won't be an everyday occurrence. But on the days I post on Flickr, there will rarely be a viewership under three figures, despite the relative paucity of my images there. That's primarily because there are actually people still ON Flickr.

I looked at the number of PBase galleries updated in the Recent Galleries pages over the week ending 26 January 2025. How many were there? 1,298. Hey, that's not bad! But wait. How many of those are from the same people? There's Bug Guy, who turns the Recents into an insect infestation when he's around with separate galleries for every conceivable bug by species, and possibly by nickname. He did 91 galleries. (And of course PBase has never bothered to provide us with the ability to filter accounts in the Recents, so you see 'em, oh, you see 'em.) There's the guy whose account name ends in "Photography" and who I've never seen post an actual photo... that wasn't someone else's political meme, anyway. 31 of the gallery updates were his. 5 other people updated over 20 galleries during the week. A further 14 updated 10 or more. So how many unique accounts?

439.

Yes, the total number of people who have posted on PBase in the last week is less than 13% of the number of Flickr members who saw one photo of mine in one day.

Take a close look at the comments that you get on PBase and do an honest appraisal. How many are from people that you don't visit or comment on regularly? How many fresh eyes see your work? I can count 1 in the last 6 months.

Since the start of this year I had been posting in parallel on Flickr and PBase. It would actually be relatively easy to continue uploading to both sites save for one thing; the PBase uploader. A lot of my descriptions (especially for yet to be uploaded European shots) have foreign accented characters. The PBase uploader, which was designed on the cutting edge of 1998 technology, still can't handle Unicode / UTF-8 or anything other than "'Murrican ASCII!" It still can't identify and upload lens types, either. Thus every time, EVERY. Fricking. Time. I do an upload to PBase I have to manually set the lens for each shot. And if the focal length is 40mm I need to check which lens it was in Bridge first. I also have to manually fill in the location, and manually edit words like café (I left that one as it is; it's the word for "a place you go to for coffee") to remove the gibberish characters that the uploader can't handle because its underlying technology is a quarter of a century out of date. In the aforementioned football match gallery many of the players had accented names so pretty much every image needed to be updated, and I'm not interested in doing THAT again. What do I need to do on Flickr? Drag the images onto the uploader and set the albums (galleries) and groups that I want to upload to. Then click [Upload]. Oh, and unlike PBase I can actually have an image in more than one album. You can do that on PBase too? Mmm. Now try navigating to the "Next" photo of an image that has been copied to a gallery, and see where you end up. Since PBase's future development plan seems to consist of Slug staring into space and muttering "I have a dream..." and Emily popping into the News forum every 3 years and hinting at Great! Things! Coming!, I seriously doubt that these issues will ever be resolved.

This isn't "Goodbye PBase" - I still have far too much baggage here which will still take far too long to move, and I still have 9 months of membership left - but I think the time has come to transfer my flag to Flickr and for the most part just upload there unless I have a reason to do otherwise. Whatever the posting numbers come in at for 2025, my contribution to them will be distinctly limited.