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Tourists Versus Locals: Mapping Geo-Tagged Photos

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Every day, hundreds of thousands of people upload their images to Flickr. Vacation shots, daily diary-style documentations, events, candids, and more go into the massive Flickr collective, many with geo-tagged location information that photographer Eric Fischer has turned into some really remarkable maps showing where people take photos in cities all over the world.

After creating an initial set of geo-tagged photo maps, Fischer then took the data a step further to create maps that show where the locals take photos versus where tourists take their shots. They're color coded 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). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

We took a look at Fischer's maps, and isolated some areas of photo activity concentration, like UCLA (locals!) and the Hollywood Walk of Fame (tourists!) and many more you'll recognize.

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