Most Popular Tourist Sites: Flickr’s Geo-tagged Photos Findings

May 7th, 2009 by Dr. Taly Weiss

Filed under cybers, flickr, information, internet behavior, location, maps, research 2.0, tagging, Trend Spots, Trend Spotting Behavior, Trend Spotting Tools, Trend Targets & Groups, visualization

Billions of photos have been uploaded to the internet, and by that are considered a valuable source for data mining. Many of the photos are tagged with text descriptions to allow search. Information on popular cameras can easily be obtained. But even more exciting is the geo-information which specifies the specific world location of the photo taken.

Considering the fact that Flickr alone carries over one h undred million geotagged photos (out of a total of 3 billion photos) – research is starting to be meaningful. This is what driven David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to analyze the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites.

The enormous dataset provides a global picture of “what the world is paying attention to”, the researchers say. They ran statistical analyses to identify the more important clusters on each map. Next they analysed the text tags added to photographs in those clusters, as well as key visual features from each image, to automatically find the world’s most interesting tourist sites.

According to the Flickr’s data – New York is the world’s most photographed city. But London contains four of the seven most photographed landmarks in the world – Trafalgar Square, the Tate Modern art gallery, Big Ben and the London Eye.

For the Apple fans of you- the Apple Store in Manhattan was found the fifth-most photographed place in the city!

See a gallery of the Flickr maps

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2 Responses

MC Deli Says:
May 9th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Scientists discover tourists photograph Big Ben – what a shocker. Thanks. What’s next; digital trendspotters use crowd sourcing to find that the Pope may actually be Catholic but data inconclusive at this time because only 5% of iPhone users responded.
bowflex 552 Says:
November 23rd, 2011 at 1:28 pm
One day Kevin is gonna catch an accidental elbow from that crazy clap you do. Don’t get all butt hurt its just a warning. JR Barthel likes mushroom tips and if you like him so do you.