« Photography: What Flickr Photos Can Tell Us »

 Cornell University study of Flickr pics found Apple Cube Store to be 5th most photographed NYC landmark.

The most photographed landmarks worldwide are: Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square and London’s Tate Modern

The most photographed cities worldwide are: New York City, London and San Francisco

The most photographed NYC landmarks are: Empire State Building, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station (and, surprisingly, the fifth most popular NYC landmark is the Apple Cube Store … ahead of the Statue of Liberty)

These are findings in a study conducted by Cornell University researchers who set out to test techniques for analyzing a global collection of georeferenced photographs. They evaluated the effectiveness of these techniques on a pool of 35 million Flickr images. The resulting published study, titled Mapping the World’s Photos, describes the researchers’ approach:

Our approach combines content analysis based on text tags and image data with structural analysis based on geospatial data. We use the spatial distribution of where people take photos to define a relational structure between the photos that are taken at popular places. We then study the interplay between this structure and the content, using classification methods for predicting such locations from visual, textual and temporal features of the photos.

The researchers’ say the techniques tested in this study could prove quite useful in photo management and organization applications. For example, they say the proposed geoclassification method used in the study “could allow photo management systems like Flickr to automatically suggest geotags, significantly reducing the labor involved in adding geolocation annotations.”

Even more intriguing is what the researchers call the “explicit relational structure in social media ties between photographers":

Preliminary investigation suggests that these can be quite strongly correlated. For example, we observe that if two users have taken a photo within 24 hours and 100 km of each other, on at least five occasions and at five distinct geographic locations, there is a 59.8% chance that they are Flickr contacts.