Flickr users with a pro account have some great new features available. A pro account is only $25 a year, and a lot of amateur photographers like myself are "pros" on Flickr.

Flickr is now integrated with Picnik. And Flickr now has stats.

I first wrote about Picnik in Edit Photos Online for Free with Picnik. It's a powerful editing tool that you can get to directly from your Flickr account. When you're looking at an individual photo of your own, simply click the Edit Photo icon above the photo.

The photo opens in Picnik while you're still a part of Flickr. You do what you want and save the photo right back in your Flickr account.

The blogosphere (and I'm told the Twitter users) are abuzz lately about Flickr stats. Kathy P (aka kperfetto) at Available Light said in a post I Like Having New Toys,

Flickr is now offering stats to those with a paid account. Just go to your home page, and where it says "you" drag the menu down until you see "stats" to activate it. It only took a few minutes for me, so don't freak out if you see a "check back tomorrow" message. It's insanely addictive. Once activated, you'll see a stats link on each photo that will take you to a page that shows how many views that photo has gotten -- and where they came from. (For instance, I didn't know this photo of mine was linked on this site.)

Anne Helmond also commented on the 24 hour wait to see your stats once you sign up for it. She created a custom "under construction" graphic that you can see in NEW! Flickr Stats! Under Construction. And the Horror of Referrer Spam.

Flickr just started offering statistics to it’s pro users, that’s me! I couldn’t be happier. Flickr really loves me!

I just loved their announcement with all the oldskool “under construction” graphics. To honor the good old days, I made an animated gif from the announcement.

In addition to seeing referrers and stats for individual photos, you can also see daily and all time aggregate stats for your photos.

Kristen Nicole, from Mashable, pointed out the new service in Who’s Using Your Flickr Photos? Flickr Now Has Stats, saying,

The thing about the inclusion of stats is that it’s much easier to track your photos across the web. You’ll be presented with all your referral links, so you can see the way in which your photos are being used. From this meta-data you can make decisions on tweaking your tag words, titles and descriptions so you can better promote (or restrict) your images. If you find out that your images are being used a great amount by third-party Flickr services, such as slide shows or feed readers, and you’re uncomfortable with this, you may decide to opt out of the Flickr API service, so your public images will no longer be available for this occurrence.

What it boils down to is the fact that more knowledge of how your content is being accessed and utilized helps you make better decisions. Coming directly from Flickr, it takes some of the leg work out of finding the majority of this information for yourself. Stats are updated once a day, and do not include your views of your own photos. Other Flickr members will not be displayed as referrers, and search engine referrers are counted as a group, which includes major engines Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN, Ask.com and live.com.

The referrer information shows daily and all time referrals, as well as search engine referrals.

Seeing where her photos were coming from caused pro Flickr user Penny T to watermark her photos in an effort to be clear about copyrights on photos that get displayed on other sites.

The rules on Flickr state that anyone using your photos without including a direct link back to your Flickr account is supposed to get your permission. I've had several contacts from people who wanted to use my Flickr photos and did ask my permission. My image of Alice Walker for example, is used on Wikipedia. If you click on it, you don't go back to my Flickr page, but you do see the photo credited to me. Penny T is using the information from Flickr stats to find photos of hers that she feels are not properly credited to her, which I consider one of the best features of Flickr stats.

You can see individual information on your most viewed photos with the stats.

June Dershewitz on Web Analytics took a more global view and applied the idea of Flickr stats to all sort of user generated media. She wrote in Flickr Has Stats! One New Way to Measure User-Generated Content

In addition to content interaction data, Flickr Stats exposes, for the first time, referring URLs and keywords that bring people to photos. This is where I think the real benefit will be seen.

Keyword reports give content owners new insight into the relationship between tags and image searchability, in turn encouraging photo SEO. If someone wants their images to be found they will spend more time creating meaningful tags, and better tagging means better metadata for everyone.

So thanks, Flickr, this is great! Just one more reason for me to justify that $25/year pro account. I hope other user-generated content sites follow suit and expose measurement, too. There's plenty of room for meaningful metrics wherever individuals are sharing content.

Let's send some BlogHer love to Beth Kanter's cambodia4kidsorg Flickr account. If we're lucky, she'll drop by and let us know what the effect was on her stats.

ADDENDUM: Flickr is one of a number of photo sharing sites that announced it is posting thousands of images from the Library of Congress. Users are invited to tag these photos and to use them in various legally acceptable ways in their own work. Look for this material in The Commons on Flickr.