Touristiness heatmap by number of public photos | Hacker News Reader

Touristiness heatmap by number of public photos

maps.google.com

105 pointsvl42 comments

Cool idea, but I think the data is skewed by population density, for example, the map shows Juarez as being more touristy than the Grand Canyon. A better approach might be to map the ratio of photos to population density.

Yup: http://uuorld.com/gallery?image=89

That's one of the coolest maps I've seen in a while. Thank you.

Thx. Me and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=martian wrote the software to make it. Martian made that particular map.

Where did you get the data? Is it free? I'd love to make some realtime software like this.

Many places. World Bank, Census, IMF etc. Do a text search on this page: http://uuorld.com/portal/ for "set:" Each set is free from its source but they require lots of tedious massaging to reformat.

I thought we were talking about user submitted, geo-tagged photographs?

Why the downvote? I'm genuinely confused. I guess I could have read the link better, maybe this thread isn't talking about that?

I didn't down-vote you but I was talking about the raw statistics used as input to the visualization engine. I had assumed you wanted to build some data-visualization software and was pointing out the places to get stats.

It sounds like the guy who compiled the data is thinking of doing that too:

http://www.bluemoon.ee/~ahti/touristiness-map/

Agreed, it pretty much follows population density. Some notable exceptions are Utah, Colorado, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Smoky Mountains (on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina), the Carolina beaches, Vermont, northern New Hampshire, and the Adirondacks of New York.

Upper Michigan has some definite breaks with population density. Escanaba has nothing, while Mackinac Island is very bright. Closer to home, there are hotspots at Houghton/Hancock and Copper Harbor, but emptiness in between, whereas Calumet/Laurium is quite a bit more populous than anywhere farther up the peninsula.

Another exception is the Oregon Coast (where I grow up) It's bright yellow but pretty much no one lives there (relatively speaking). For example, the county I grew up, Lincoln County, is roughly the size of Rhode Island but has only around 45,000 people (figures from memory).

But it is extremely touristy. Highway 101 grinds to a stand still most summer days, especially when it's really hot inland in Portland / Salem / Eugene.

Also, the Antarctic Peninsula.

Sure is, Compton is bright yellow, for example :-)

I am the author of the map. Sure, I will take population into account in the next revision. My main focus when creating this was to discover less touristy places, so I did not pay much attention to cities.

Great idea.

Wouldn't have expected the USA to be that much less touristy than Europe, though. And within Europe, western France seems to attract fewer photographs than even rurual Turkey.

Yeah, it's hard to deduce what the resolution of this heatmap is. I imagine the Alps are popular. But every square km like that? Seems rather unlikely... (very cool idea as mentioned though)

ETA. Based on http://www.panoramio.com/ -- I think a little bit of the skew in the Alps may have to do with panoramas counting for larger area (you can cover a lot more area from peaks in the Alps than say...at lower altitudes). The rest seems very legit. Very nice...

I think that it depends on what is being photographed. In rural Turkey, it will be toursists photographing each other, in Western France it will be tourists photographing the Eiffel tower.

Plenty of very highly visited areas are not that memorable by themselves other than that they receive a large amount of sunshine and this alone will attract large numbers of tourists from the North West of Europe.

I don't think panoramio includes photos of people taking pictures of one another.

The map is based on the distribution of photos from http://www.panoramio.com, a photo-sharing website. The site was originally based in Spain, so perhaps there are relatively more photos from European users.

Would be nice to see this by time of the year so you can plan your trip when everybody else is not at your destination.

Winter.

Not for the Alps :)

And not in the Southern hemisphere either.

They have winter in the southern hemisphere too. ;-)

Tricky question, is winter when it is cold or is winter when it is December ?

Not tricky at all. Winter is in June, July, August

Or mud season. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_season

Simple. Go to an Interesting Remote Place instead of a touristy place. I recommend Isle Royale in Lake Superior.

I am the author of the Touristiness Map, and I just added a "Interesting Remote Places" map where I take in population data from geonames.org. It is on the same webpage as the Touristiness Map: http://www.bluemoon.ee/~ahti/touristiness-map/

I swear I picked the name before I saw your post :P

Sure enough, Isle Royale is a bright spot on that map... :)

If you like that site then you may find the Geograph project interesting:

http://www.geograph.org.uk/

The have high resolution (100m x 100m) resolution photo heat maps of the UK. (Note the amount of green in Scotland, meaning no pics at all of that grid square).

Why is yellow the 'hottest'? That sort of goes against every other map of this type, no? Also, it seems to be in need of some calibration. The Alps get lots of tourists, but Venice gets way more. Oodles of them.

That said, I love the concept and the clever use of public data to make a guess about something else.

From December to April the Alps get a hell of a lot of visitors - the big ski resorts (especially the French ones) are huge.

Yeah, I know - I lived in Innsbruck. Nothing like any day of the year in Venice, though.

3 Valleys, Espace Killy, Paradiski....

I'd go with the Alps

How about making it detect clusters of photos at locations. So I can look within say 20 miles of my area and find certain locations where there are a lot of photos?

Dang. While it works well in Indiana (it detects the Metamora artists' colony), it pretty much maxes the meter in Western Europe and Puerto Rico (the latter basically looks like a glowing hot brick).

Surprisingly, Pyongyang looks pretty bright.

One could argue that North Korea is safer than (say) Thailand now, but I still wonder why go there if you aren't a researcher or spy.

I would've thought all Irerland to be colored in. What's with the stretch of N60 between Ballyhaunis and Castlerea? The N5 just to the south and west of Lough Gara as well.

I'd like to know what this has to do with "touristiness". Were only photos used that were tagged eg "vacation"? Germany is a land of spammers and contribution-freaks (as in "I must add an photo here, I will be the first") but I highly doubt it is such a popular holiday destination.

I get your second point (although I think desire to 'level up' is nothing particularly German) but 'land of spammers'?

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