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The result times out because there is a large amount of /common/image topics.  Usually, the way to request counts is:

{
  "id" : null,
  "return" : "count",
  "type" : "/common/image"
}

But this will still time out on requests with a large amount of topics.  You could query for the instance count which is tallied nightly:

{
  "/freebase/type_profile/instance_count" : null,
  "id" : "/common/image"
}

but that isn't real-time.

Lastly, you could count yourself by using a cursor and counting until the end of the result set:

{
 "cursor": true,
    "query":  [{
       "id" : null,
     "type" : "/common/image"
    }]
}

To find topics that have an image, you can query for them like so:

[
  {
    "id" : null,
    "image" : [
      {
        "id" : null
      }
    ],
    "type" : "/common/topic"
  }
]

Again, the resultset is very large and will time out, so you will need to cursor and count yourself.

Thanks, that's really helpful!

Now if i'm not mistaken there're about 700K images and 330K topics with image. Does that imply that on average those topics with images each has 2 images? Thanks.

You can just break the link between an image and a topic and not have the image deleted.  Just for fun, I ran a quick analysis:

Found 716008 /common/topic topics with image links (out of ~4 million topics)
650326 have one img
63058 have two imgs
2296 have three imgs
328 have four or more imgs

Thank you. It seems I don't know enough of MQL language; let me know if there's reference other than this website for I don't want to bother you like this.

I use the following code embedded in a perl code to count the number of topics with at least one image, and the result is about 438K--much lower than yours. By the way how to get the number of topics with exactly 1, 2, or 3 images? Can this be requested directly in the query?

{
  "qname":{
    "cursor":<cursor value>

    "query":[{
      "id":null,
      "limit":1000,
      "type":"/common/topic",
      "image":[{
        "id":null
      }]
    }]
  }
}

Some MQL reference material can be found here.  I iterated through topics with images and then recorded the number of links there were.  Currently, you can't constrain the query to ask it to return topics with exactly n amount of images.  I'm not sure why your results differ so greatly that mine - I'll try to investigate a little more.

The following is the code I used. Have a look only if you're free. I print out $count to see number of topics with images and $count~438

Afterwards I grep entire query result and got numbers close to you: 

692001 topics with image

626805 topics with 1 image

62827 topics with 2 images

2210 topcis with 3 images

and so on...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use URI::Escape; 
# This module provides the uri_escape function used below

# Build the Metaweb query, using string manipulation
# CAUTION: the use of string manipulation here makes this script vulnerable
# to MQL injection attacks when the command-line argument includes JSON.
#$band = $ARGV[0]; # This is the band or musician whose albums are to be listed

my $cursor = 'true';
my $query;
my $pre =
'{
    "qname":{
        "cursor":';

my $post = ',
        "query":[{
            "id":null,
            "limit":1000,
            "type":"/common/topic",
            "image":[{
                "return":"count",
                "id":null
            }]
        }]
    }
}';

my $allresult = '';
my $count = 0;
my $result = '';

until($cursor =~ /error/){
#while($cursor){
    $query = $pre . $cursor . $post;

    $escaped = uri_escape($query);

    $baseurl='http://www.freebase.com/api/service/mqlread'; # Base URL for queries
    $url = $baseurl . "?queries=" . $escaped;

    $auth = 'metaweb-user=###Enter Your cookie data here###';

    #$result = `curl -s --cookie \'$auth\' $url`;
    $result = `curl -s $url`;

   
    $result =~ /\/api\/status\/(.*)/;
    $status = $1;

    $result =~ /cursor\":\s*(\".*\")/;
    $cursor = $1;

    $count = $count + 1;

    print $result . "\n";
}

# Use regular expressions to extract the album list from the HTTP response
#$result =~ s/^.*"album"\s*:\s*\[\s*([^\]]*)\].*$/$1/s;
#$result =~ s/[ \t]*"[ \t,]*//g;
#print $allresult ."\n";

print 'done'."\n";
# Finally, display the list of albums
#print "$result\n";
#
# vim: ts=2 sw=2

I think freebase has mimicked wikipedia in populating the "/view/en" (i.e. english language) namespace.  Clearly, there can be only one leonardo_da_vinci, and that's not a problem in many cases. There are probably many topics in freebase that could be reliably identified by their common name in that space but the freebase staff (who control it) haven't caught up.  Perhaps some collaborative feature in this are would be helpful e.g. "suggest a unique name for this topic", "flag this topic as more deserving of 'john_smith' " :)

your idea of creating other url paths that represent namespaces is fantastic e.g. NYSE stock symbols could be /view/nyse/ge. This could go a long way for providing user readable urls to topics.

I think freebase.com should consider this a pretty hot feature request; it's not possible now. At least, the company could start creating url/namespaces, but allowing users to create (or at least nominate them) should be considered as well.

Hmmm...

Well, if I could spec this, I'd like to be able to form an inbound link to Freebase by providing a property name and a value, and simply get a page to view the article from that.  e.g. ("book/book_edition/isbn", "817525766")  If this does not specify a unique article, then come up with a list of all matches.

http://freebase.com/api/view?property="book/book_edition/isbn"?value="817525766"

So maybe overloading view (or something otherwise prettier) could be good:

http://freebase.com/view/book/book_edition/isbn=817525766

A key goal would be that when you loaded an article this way, you would not be redirected, but rather see that "pretty" URL in the address bar.

This way pretty links would come from properties of the data, without anyone having to do extra work in disambiguation that hadn't already been done.

Really?  This sounds good.  How would I go about doing this?

As you probably guessed from our discussion in Music, I'm actually trying to link to albums by catalog #.  (Imagine a manufacturer who has several releases of the same album, under different numbers, and would like the links to go to the appropriate Freebase article.  So that's what we're looking for.  A pretty URL with the catalog number in it, instead of GUID, which takes one to the appropriate page to upload cover art or edit the track info.)

It appears, however, that the albums are not correctly organized right now, since multiple releases of the same album are in Freebase as separate "albums".  I'm worried about how doing the work of properly sorting releases might interfere with synchronizing the data with MusicBrainz... is it better just to let well enough alone?

You can make namespaces, such as /user/metaeducation/labels and /user/metaeducation/labels/capitol, with the query editor. Create an instance of /type/namespace and add a key into the parent namespace.

{

  "type":"/type/namespace",

  "name":"My Namespace",

  "key":{

    "value":"sample",

    "namespace":"/user/metaeducation"

  },

  "create":"unless_exists"

}

will create an instance of Namespace addressable as /user/metaeducation/sample. You can add things to that namespace:

{

  "id":"/guid/deadbeefcafebabedeadbabecafebeef",

  "key":{

    "value":"why_dead_beef",

    "namespace":"/user/metaeducation/sample",

    "connect":"insert"

  }

}

As for uniqueness of albums: the problem is that MusicBrainz only models releases, not actual albums. We attempt to identify releases of the same albums, but we inevitably miss some as it is an automated process. Duplicate albums should be marked for merge. 

Chris, the platform schema shows that the “Games” property is hidden and deprecated; what you want is the “Games On This Platform” property (games_on_this_platform) instead. Keep in mind that that property points to a compound value type, so you will then need to ask for the game property of that.

{

  "query":{

    "games_on_this_platform":[{

      "game":null

    }],

    "name":"Xbox 360",

    "type":"/cvg/cvg_platform"

  }

}

Thanks for the reply. I do have a suggestion/question though for the site in general. Why not show, on the site, the query used to generate the data on the page?

 For example, this page: http://www.freebase.com/view/reorder/topic/en/xbox_360?propertyId=%2Fcvg%2Fcvg_platform%2Fgames_on_this_platform&returnUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freebase.com%2Fview%2Fxbox_360

It would be good to see the query used to generate all of those results and would make it easier for people to get to grips with it. 

I agree with the last statement.  I was wondering exactly the same thing.

"Why not show, on the site, the query used to generate the data on the page?"

Hmmm, seems like you may have stumbled on to a regression. I'll file an internal bug, but in the meantime, you can try this URL: http://dev.mqlx.com/~nick/reports/userdetail.html?user=%2Fuser%2Fevening

Thanks for reporting this!

I've been told that this has been fixed in the upcoming release.