
World’s most photographed places - shawndumas
http://www.sightsmap.com/
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te_platt
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.

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crazygringo
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.

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altrego99
When you zoom in, you do in fact control for differential population density
to a lot of extent.

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blueblob
Not for the markers though, they are mostly for cities with high densities of
people.

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dionidium
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/](http://xkcd.com/1138/)

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

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dclowd9901
He should make another one on the correlation of this comic being linked to in
the comments of a heat-map related HN submission.

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julien_c
And one on this very comment.

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bpm140
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.

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shalmanese
walkingsf did a series of heatmaps based on flickr data:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/7215762420915863...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624209158632/)

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scottcha
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.

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wtvanhest
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.

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ClementM
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.

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m_mueller
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).

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guard-of-terra
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.

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

[http://www.geograph.org.uk/](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]

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wavesounds
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](http://www.flickr.com/map)

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Houshalter
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...](http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html)).
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.

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

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brc
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.

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nraynaud
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.

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tammet
Eiffel tower photo locations are spread over a fairly wide area, while Moulin
Rouge photos are taken in a relatively small spot, hence more intense.

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brc
A very good point. The Eiffel tower photos will only show up when people are
ironically taking photos _from_ the tower, instead _of_ the tower. It's much
too big to get a good photo of with normal point and shoot lenses. There will
be related hotspots such as from across the river, but lots of random photos
on the streets will be of the tower from different angles.

Whereas the Moulin Rouge is tucked into a street, and that street is the only
place you can snap it.

A great innovation in camera tech would be to tag the 'main' object being
photographed if it is more than _x_ m away from the camera itself. Using GPS
for direction, and using some type of algorithm for detecting the main image,
I'm sure you could get a decent approximation of the target as well as the
shooters location. That would make for some interesting data and you'd be able
to sort on landscape vs portrait photos just by examining the GPS data.

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Chestofdraw
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?

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tammet
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.

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avighnay
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.

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chintanp
Does anyone know the data source for this?

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

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

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shabinesh
Amazing work.

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69_years_and
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.

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

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

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ps4fanboy
Look at North Korea

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ithinkso
How data like that are gathered? Amazing.

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ye
Holy crap, Somalia.

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anonymfus
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-1/)

[http://tema.ru/travel/somaliland-2/](http://tema.ru/travel/somaliland-2/)

[http://tema.ru/travel/somaliland-3/](http://tema.ru/travel/somaliland-3/)

[http://tema.ru/travel/somalia/](http://tema.ru/travel/somalia/)

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

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Zaheer
Thanks for the links! Very interesting read!

