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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Southern Utah is Arches and Moab etc.

Also Zion, Bryce. Spectacular sights.

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

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.

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

And one on this very comment.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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]

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 xm 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.

I'm a bit sad that there is no scale for extreme hotspots - I'm sure you'd be able to pinpoint the Mona Lisa's location in the Louvre otherwise.

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

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

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).

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

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...

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?

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.

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.

Does anyone know the data source for this?

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

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

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

Amazing work.

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.

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

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

Look at North Korea

How data like that are gathered? Amazing.

Holy crap, Somalia.

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.

Thanks for the links! Very interesting read!

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...