Mapping Flickr

Today's map is a visualisation of all 34 million geotagged Flickr images. The data were kindly collected by Eric Fischer and then aggregated to the country-level (an operation that took our computer about three weeks to process!).

You can see that user-generated images in Flickr display similar geographies to other types of user-generated content (e.g. Wikipedia). In the next few weeks, we'll upload some variations of this map. These results aren't necessarily surprising, but do just reinforce findings that subjects of user-generated content are highly concentrated in only a few parts of the world.

Mapping Geographies of Interest: Tourists vs. Locals

Eric Fischer has struck again and expanded on the Geotaggers' World Atlas. He has now released a series of map that use Flickr data to distinguish between photos taken by locals and photos taken by tourists. The results are fascinating, and you get to see very different areas of interest between locals and tourists. In the three maps below (London, San Francisco and New York, red pictures are taken by tourists and blue pictures are taken by locals. Head over to his site for the full collection of 81 maps.

The Geotaggers' World Atlas (and cyberscapes, too!)

Having just stumbled across another amazing visualization of geotagged photographs, we figured we'd go ahead and share more of the stuff we've been looking at these days. The following map comes from Eric Fischer's The Geotaggers' World Atlas on Flickr, which, you guessed it, maps geotagged Flickr photos. What's so unique about Fischer's series of maps is that he focuses on how fast the photographer was moving when they took the picture by comparing time and date stamps on geotagged photos.

Geotagged Flickr Photos in San Francisco by Eric Fischer

In his maps, black lines indicate walking speed (less than 7mph), while red lines approximate bicycling speed (less than 19mph), blue is for motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph) and green indicates freeways or rapid transit. Based on the repetitive tracing, it's possible to see the places within each city that have been photographed and geotagged most frequently. So how might these concentrations of geotagged Flickr photos compare to our maps of urban cyberscapes around the world?

All User-Generated Google Maps Content in San Francisco

Although the purpose and scale of these two visualizations are different, they both show a roughly similar concentration of user-generated content (in either Flickr or Google Maps) around Market Street in San Francisco. Since Fischer did this exercise for 50 different cities around the world, some of which we've already mapped using our own method, the comparisons between the two can go on and on.

Let us know if you find anything else interesting!

World touristiness map

Ahti Henla has produced a fascinating mashup that allows people to view the density of Panoramio images across the planet. The patterns in his visualisations look remarkably similar to the geographies of content in Google and Wikipedia that we have previously mapped out.

Head over to Ahti's site for the interactive map, or play with the KML file that he has also usefully made available.