Image: New York from The Geotaggers' World Atlas by Eric Fischer
Eric Fischer has conducted some interesting studies of major world cities by re-mapping them according to the frequency of geo-tagged images sourced from both Flickr and Picasa. His method is not exactly clear but I assume the vector information is generated by joining a single user’s individual snaps in order of sequence. The product is something of considerable beauty and may help to pre-empt the spatial extent of computing such information via programmes such as GRAIL’s Building Rome in a Day project, as demonstrated in their animation of San Marco Square, Rome. The image underlay is extracted from the OpenStreetMap dataset.
Image: London from Locals and Tourists by Eric Fischer
In addition Fischer has conducted a second study aimed at differentiating between photos taken by locals and tourists, which he demarcates as follows:
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).
