Heat Map of Geotagged Photos in World Cities
Eric Fischer created two series of major world city maps showing where people take photos, using geocoding information from Flickr and Picasa. In his first series hosted on Flickr, titled The Geotaggers’ World Atlas, he used geo tagged photos over a nine day period in late May 2010 to show a heatmap of where most photos were snapped.
A week later, he created a second series over a five day period in early June 2010, titled Locals and Tourists giving the city maps more depth by comparing “tourists” to “locals”.
He explained:
Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).
Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).
Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.
Purple would obviously be the merging of both tourists and locals.
Of course, these only count those photos that were geo-tagged and posted on Picasa and Flickr publicly. But the series gives you a great idea of where to go on vacation, where the locals go and if you’re thinking of opening a camera supply store, where to setup shop.
For me, this is a big help as I have a planned trip to San Francisco in a couple months and it’s also quite inspiring; data visualization made art!
