Flickr and the world’s favourite landmarks

I recently read an article on the Guardian’s PDA blog by the beautifully named Jemima Kiss, which referenced a New Scientist piece about a Cornell University project.

The people at Cornell used a supercomputer to analyse the location of 35m photos on Flickr and mapped them. The results reflect the user base of Flickr and the world’s favourite landmarks.

New York is the most photographed, though London has four of the seven most photographed. The team limited the number of pictures from each of the 300,000 users to ensure the images retained balanced.

The most photographed cities:

1 New York City
2 London
3 San Francisco
4 Paris
5 Los Angeles
6 Chicago
7 Washington, DC
8 Seattle
9 Rome
10 Amsterdam

The most photographed landmarks:

1 Eiffel Tower – Paris
2 Trafalgar Square – London
3 Tate Modern museum – London
4 Big Ben – London
5 Notre Dame – Paris
6 The Eye – London
7 Empire State Building – New York City

So it’s really interesting to see, for instance, that despite being less than ten years old, the London Eye is already right up there with the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building. A fantastic achievement.

Our very own London gets an impressive showing – we should all forget the trials of tube travel and the grey weather and be grateful that we live in such a highly-regarded city.

Have any of you used Flickr? We have set up a few Flickr groups for clients – they seem to be popular enough, but don’t seem to have the ‘commentability’ of Facebook. Would be interested to hear how people think Flickr benefits the travel industry.