World’s most photographed places

http://www.sightsmap.com/

by shawndumas • 13 years ago

180 50 13 years ago

sightsmap.com

wtvanhest2• 13 years ago

Finally, proof that acorn street is not the most photographed street in the world.

Amazing work on this. I just found some new places to go on vacation.

scottcha• 13 years ago

Interesting to see the hotspots in non-populated places. I took a look around the Washington Cascade Mountains and you can see photos aligning around the main trails, peaks, road turnouts and other sights.

ye• 13 years ago

Holy crap, Somalia.

mxfh• 13 years ago

Not even that faint dot of Socatra just east of it belongs to Somalia, that remarkable island is part of Yemen.

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/most-alien-looking-p...

anonymfus• 13 years ago

If you are interested in relatively fresh photos of everyday Somali, you could look at reports of famous Russian traveller and designer Artemiy Lebedev:

http://tema.ru/travel/somaliland-1/

http://tema.ru/travel/somaliland-2/

http://tema.ru/travel/somaliland-3/

http://tema.ru/travel/somalia/

English versions of this reports are available, switcher is in top right corner.

Zaheer• 13 years ago

Thanks for the links! Very interesting read!

chintanp• 13 years ago

Does anyone know the data source for this?

uptown• 13 years ago

"The heatmap shows the places people like, based on the number of panoramio photos at each place in the world."

kps• 13 years ago

Panoramio, according to the top-row ‘?’.

ps4fanboy• 13 years ago

Look at North Korea

chrisbolt• 13 years ago

Doesn't seem to work at all in Safari, had to switch to Chrome.

shabinesh• 13 years ago

Amazing work.

69_years_and• 13 years ago

Yes it is, I upon zooming into my area of the world, a sparsely populated area, but visited by tourists, the map highlights the road system, and all of the tourist trips that are undertaken on a boat, or on a walking/tramping track. This information is great feedback for tourist operators in my area, of which I'm not one. But I'll be passing the link onto them.

avighnay• 13 years ago

A great new way to find interesting places, awesome indeed!

This is what a social network should be, a place where human collective consciousness is used to better our choices in life.

ClementM• 13 years ago

Interesting to see that France which is supposed to be the most visited country in the world is not the brightest area in Europe...at all.

Could there be a bias in the data due to the fact that all the countries don't have the same usage rate of social medias ? Or just population density ? Or official statistics are the ones that are biaised...

Anyway, great work. Loved it.

m_mueller• 13 years ago

My guess: In France everything concentrates in Paris, while other popular sites are 'diluted' (there is not the spot in Provence, Normandy or Bretagne where everyone takes pictures).

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

I think this is true but the background color of the whole France is too dark even for that. I will assume that French don't use panoramio for some reason.

dionidium• 13 years ago

There are probably some sites in here that really are photographed more, but a lot of it seems to be some version of this: http://xkcd.com/1138/

Edit: Oh! It's much more useful if you zoom in. Sorry for the knee-jerk.

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

He should make another one on the correlation of this comic being linked to in the comments of a heat-map related HN submission.

julien_c• 13 years ago

And one on this very comment.

beggi• 13 years ago

Wonder why Europe has so many more photograph density than the US. Just correlating with higher population density?

hfsktr• 13 years ago

History? I don't know the source so maybe there is a bias of what data is available.

brc2• 13 years ago

The average population density of western europe is much higher than the average population density of even the eastern USA.

Coupled with the fact that there is a lot more 'older' stuff there, whether castles, old battlefields, churches, you name it, it's not surprising there are a lot more tourist photos being taken. The average European city is a lot more photogenic than the average American or Asian city (clearly there are exceptions, given NY is #1).

Tourism is not necessarily a function of what is the best thing to do, but what is the best thing to do, given a set budget, timeframe and comfort level. On those scores, tourism in western europe wins.

nraynaud• 13 years ago

I just checked Paris, the most photographed is Moulin Rouge, in the middle of the former prostitutes quarter. More photographed than arc de triumph, Eiffel tower, of the 2 km long Champs Élysée.

We have to talk either about tourists motivations or the effect of the difference between the camera position and the target position in density maps relevance.

lelf• 13 years ago

There are much more to see in rural areas in Europe than in US, plain and simple. Plus, perhaps, different density distribution (but first sentence covers that too).

antimagic• 13 years ago

Although weirdly there is a big dark space in France - what's with that?

arethuza2• 13 years ago

Isn't a lot of France fairly rural and with a low population density - the distribution of pictures in Europe seems to match population density fairly closely:

http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-143547/Population-de...

riffraff• 13 years ago

most of the pictures reflect tourism density, US has less than one fifth of the yearly tourists of europe.

bpm140• 13 years ago

Back in 2007, one of the teams at Yahoo Research Berkeley (YRB) built an awesome tool on top of Flickr that showed on a map the things that were photographed somewhat, but not a ton.

For instance, it wouldn't surface pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it did show pictures of the Yoda statue in the Presidio (how I learned of it's existence). There was even day mode and night mode to see what was interesting, but not well known, at different times.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it never found its way to actual release, but it taught me a ton about where to look in data for the cool bits of info.

shalmanese• 13 years ago

walkingsf did a series of heatmaps based on flickr data: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/7215762420915863...

te_platt• 13 years ago

I'm curious how this would look if it were somehow "divided by" population density. It wouldn't make sense for somewhere in the middle of the ocean but it might highlight more remote, scenic places. edit: For example I noticed that southern Utah is significantly brighter than you would expect from population density.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

That was my first reaction too.

But zooming all the way in (to Manhattan, for example), it's clear that the heat map corresponds to actual scenic tourist spots, it goes all the way down to street level, pretty amazing.

And since these are "panoramio" photos, not selfies snapped for Facebook, it would seem to be a pretty accurate reflection of tourist destinations, as opposed to population.

altrego99• 13 years ago

When you zoom in, you do in fact control for differential population density to a lot of extent.

wtvanhest2• 13 years ago

Southern Utah is Arches and Moab etc.

prawn• 13 years ago

Also Zion, Bryce. Spectacular sights.

tammet3• 13 years ago

The "all sizes" selection has a similar effect: take "small", "tiny" or "remote" to put markers on sparsely populated locations only.

columbo• 13 years ago

I agree, I think the anomalies are more interesting than the expected.

Here's an example:

http://www.sightsmap.com/index.php?lt=45.104179&lg=-94.37551...

Also I'd love to do the reverse. Show me public places that have very infrequent photos. Especially campgrounds. I'd pay to know the least used campsites in my area.

philip1209• 13 years ago

I wonder if you could also normalize against weather - to differentiate between "Steady state" photos that happen regardless of weather vs. photos that are taken only when the view is clearly good

est• 13 years ago

At a rough glance I thought it was world’s most photoshoped places. Now that would be interesting.

wavesounds• 13 years ago

This is great! Flickr has a similar feature[1] I use all the time but I love the heat map addition

http://www.flickr.com/map

arethuza2• 13 years ago

Geograph have gamified photo density heatmaps for the UK and Ireland:

http://www.geograph.org.uk/

[i.e. You can earn points by submitting images for an empty grid square or where there haven't been any recent images]

Chestofdraw• 13 years ago

Zooming in on London, Piccadilly Circus (the no. 1 photo location in London according to this site) and found that the no.7 location here is 'Alex's Amazing Test Location of Greatness'

I wonder what this is and if anyone else has found similar spots anywhere else?

tammet3• 13 years ago

The marked locations in high-res areas like cities are based on both most popular wikipedia articles and most popular foursquare locations in the intense area. Quite likely Alex's place is one of these highly popular foursquare locations.

Houshalter• 13 years ago

Someone made a program that could reconstruct models of places from tons of automatically gathered photographs (http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosy...). Imagine creating an entire model of the world from pictures like this, as well as things like Google's streetview, and in the future tons of data from drones and robots.

izzydata• 13 years ago

This is probably going to be the coolest thing I will see all week.

ithinkso• 13 years ago

How data like that are gathered? Amazing.

World’s most photographed places

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