Visualizations of globally georeferenced Flickr photos

by alexdunkel

Over two years and no update or blog entry! I thought this would be a good start to add some content to this site.

The maps below are visualizations of geotagged photos uploaded to Flickr between 2007 to 2015 and geotagged with the highest location accuracy (streetlevel accuracy).
I generated a number of different visualizations. Some are more artistic in style while others are designed more informative.

These were created as part of my research project (maps.alexanderdunkel.com). The maps are (obviously) biased towards the western world (Europe, North America). Moreover, it seems likely that even the few photos located in Africa (and other underdeveloped parts of the world) are equally provided by this specific group. My original intention was to demonstrate that the Flickr data, albeit not universally representative, provides a particular view of the world (a ‘lens’ that is western culture-centric). But I think these maps are also just very interesting to look at.

A final note: this type of visualization has already been done years before (check out Eric Fischer’s maps). Maybe the statistics going on on the lower-right corner provide some additional information not available so far.