I am petitioning for the addition of the number of times an image has been favorited to be added to the usual display and to allow sorting images by number of favorites. Reasoning is along the same lines as why image views are currently displayed and can be sorted by.
As long it is decided not to drop the statistic entirely to save database connections when viewing images, I personally am in favor of continuing to display image views and allow the option to sort by them.
I wouldn't drop the field, but I would remove the sort by option as it requires an additional index on a large table. The times viewed count will still be shown in each image info box.