The Geotaggers' World Atlas

May 26, 2010 10:08 AM

Photographer Eric Fischer created stunning maps of the places that pictures are taken in fifty cities worldwide. New York. London. Paris. San Francisco.

Fischer took geographical data from Flickr and Picasa search APIs. Using perl scripts, the pictures were sorted by photographer and date/time. The scripts generated PostScript which were then converted to JPEGs using Ghostscript.

He determined the speed at which the photographers were traveling based on their photos’ timestamps and geotags, and plotted them on an OpenStreetMap background layer. Lines are drawn between every two pictures that are reasonably close together in place and time. The color of the lines represent different modes of transportation:

Black is walking (less than 7mph)
Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph)
Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph)
Green is freeways or rapid transit

Pictures are ordered by the density of photographs around a city center.

posted by emilyd22222 (15 comments total)

Neat. Interesting that UC Berkeley shows up as a fairly large blob in the Bay Area map.
posted by brundlefly at 10:16 AM on May 26, 2010

Not as hot as Alcatraz though.
posted by GuyZero at 10:20 AM on May 26, 2010

Very cool. Can anyone tell what the hot area is west of Chicago? I think it might be the Veterans Memorial here.
posted by lholladay at 10:21 AM on May 26, 2010

Wow - I didn't realize that there was modes of transportation assumed as well. Very keen!
posted by filthy light thief at 10:21 AM on May 26, 2010

I'm surprised the speed thing worked as well as it did. I guess other people photographically sample their position vector more often than I do.

Using perl scripts, the pictures were sorted by photographer and date/time. The scripts generated PostScript which were then converted to JPEGs using Ghostscript.

I would have used !perl and SVGs, but I guess you use what you know.
posted by DU at 10:22 AM on May 26, 2010

A potential real-world application.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:25 AM on May 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh, awesome. I wish I could order prints of these.
posted by rachaelfaith at 10:25 AM on May 26, 2010

Oh, awesome. I wish I could order prints of these.

They're CC licensed and the bigger flickr images are 6k pixels square - you can print them yourself.
posted by cromagnon at 10:29 AM on May 26, 2010

great stuff, thanks.
posted by Substrata at 10:38 AM on May 26, 2010

The fun part is recognizing the cities from the dark blobs in the navigation thumbnails.
posted by Mayor Curley at 11:01 AM on May 26, 2010

this map confirms my perception that every 1st year photo student in the new york metropolitan area beelines to dumbo to take the same 5 pictures of the brooklyn / manhattan bridge.
posted by nathancaswell at 11:12 AM on May 26, 2010

Thanks for the tip, cromagnon!
posted by rachaelfaith at 11:16 AM on May 26, 2010

Can anyone tell what the hot area is west of Chicago?

I think it's Oak Park.
posted by Iridic at 11:31 AM on May 26, 2010

Can anyone tell what the hot area is west of Chicago?

I think the oval blob in the southwest corner is the Brookfield Zoo. The more dispersed, angular area directly west of Chicago looks to be Oak Park, with its Frank Lloyd Wright houses.
posted by plastic_animals at 11:33 AM on May 26, 2010

Très cool.
Thanks, Emily.
posted by bru at 6:49 PM on May 26, 2010