TOURIST OR LOCAL? Flickr Reveals Where Different Types Of People Take Pictures In Major Cities

Anyone who lives in a major tourist destination like New York and San Francisco knows that tourists mainly confine themselves to a few well-trodden streets, usually the same ones that locals avoid like the plague.

Eric Fischer, a computer programmer from Oakland, California made some incredible data visualizations that prove it.  He took geo-tagged photos from Flickr and found an interesting way of sorting out the locals from the out-of-towners. 

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Fischer reasoned that Flickrers that only post photos from one place for less than one month are probably tourists, and the ones that post most of their content from one metropolitan area for more than one month are locals.

The spots with tourist photos are colored red, and the places where the locals are taking photos are colored blue. When it is unclear whether the photographer is a local (if they sporadically upload to Flickr, for instance) their photos are marked with yellow. 

Some places, like the Statue of Liberty and Alcatraz are like little islands of red.  Some cities are almost exclusively photographed by tourists, like Las Vegas and Istanbul.  If you are looking to target a tourist demographic, this could be useful.

Fischer mapped the activity of 135 different cities and put them all on Flickr.   Here are some of our favorites.

London -- Westminster is Tourist Ground Zero

Blue: Locals

Red: Tourists

Yellow: Probably Tourists

San Francisco -- Natives Apparently Eschew Alcatraz

Blue: Locals

Red: Tourists

Yellow: Probably Tourists

Paris -- Can You Pick Out The Arc D'Triomphe??

Blue: Locals

Red: Tourists

Yellow: Probably Tourists

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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• Sylvester Stallone's Vacation Home Gets A $500,000 Price Chop

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