Thanks Mark, Gergo & Fabrice for the answers ! This helps a lot.

I’d like to develop this point :
Would there be a possiblity to have fancy stats at a finer level? Like, how many times File:Example.jpg was enlarged ? (awesome for GLAM partners)
Currently, though I do not think it is widely used, it is possible to see how popular a file is based on the page-views of its file description − using Henrik’s service [1]. (And as usual, Magnus made an awesome tool to query that data for an entire media collection ^_^). It can be interesting especially for use cases like GLAM partnerships.

With MediaViewer, I expect that these figures will go down a lot − users just wanting to view the file in a higher resolution will have what they want without needing to browse to the file description page on Wikimedia Commons.

So as a media contributor to Wikimedia Commons, I want to know how much my file is viewed through MediaViewer ;-)

Also, here is a long wanted dream-feature request − being able to track how much a file/media collection is reused outside of Commons. Having data on MediaViewer usage of “Download” or “Reuse” would be incomplete but could provide a nice approximation.

We specifically don't store information like what image was loaded, because with a little magic we could use that information in conjunction with others to determine what a user was looking at at any given time. We were   unhappy with this idea, so we deleted [1] loads of information from the schema we're using [2].

These are serious concerns indeed… Any chance data could be anonymised or the magic exorcized so we could have both privacy-repect and awesome data?

I agree with Mark that we cannot track how often they actually share or embed a file, but at least we can find out if users seem interested in this feature.

And if we can track it, I suppose we could A/B test to see which formulations seem to make more sense to users ? ;-)


Thanks a lot for engaging in this discussion − I appreciate it a lot!
--
Jean-Frédéric