Retaining View Count in Caption

I found a post in the forum that told me how to eliminate the caption from showing in thumbnail view, but is there a way to eliminate the caption yet retain the number of times the photo has been viewed? That is, the only thing that I would like to show next to the thumbnail is the view count. If anyone could help me with this I would be most appreciative. I would imagine it involves editing the same portion of the view_album.php file as you do when you want to elimate the caption altogether, but I'm not sure about that.(??) I made a couple "guess edits" to this file, but to no avail since I do not know php. I kept getting error messages when I would click on a thumbnail.