Image by Eric Fischer from The Geotaggers' World Atlas
Any idea what the above picture is all about? No, it’s not a piece of abstract art, but a map of Dublin as you’ve probably never seen it before.
Basically the darker areas of the map show the most photographed places in Dublin, in the area from the city centre down to the Grand Canal. It’s part of photographer Eric Fischer’s fascinating series of maps of the world’s major cities, Perhaps if we zoom out the Dublin map will begin to make more sense…
Image of Greater Dublin area by Eric Fischer from The Geotaggers' World Atlas
The maps are based on geotagging – the process of adding geographical identification metadata to media such as photographs (on Flickr for example), video (on YouTube), and tweets (Twitter).
Geotagging data from Flickr
Eric’s cool idea is to use the search APIs on Flickr and Google’s Picasa to analyse public photos and pinpoint the most photographed places in major cities.
He has processed the data and shown the “most photographed” clusters for more than 50 cities already.
For some of the maps he has even determined the speed at which the photographers were travelling (based on their photos’ timestamps and geotags) in order to plot their “intensity”.
He has also subdivided results to see how tourist photographers in each city tend to cluster in different zones than the locals – in the case of Dublin, the tourists stick very much to the city centre while the locals cover more “outlying” areas such as the docklands and the National Botanical Gardens.
Maps of the future
These geotagging maps are an interesting glimpse into the future, when major players such as Google, as well as ordinary businesses and organisations such as tourism bodies, will be mining publicly available, geotagged data to build up new kinds of maps of the places in which they operate.
View more city maps on The Geotaggers’ World Atlas by Eric Fischer on his Flickr sets.
