The World According to Geotagged Photos

Story by

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Founder & board member, TNW

Boris is a serial entrepreneur who founded not only TNW, but also V3 Redirect Services (sold), HubHop Wireless Internet Provider (sold), and (show all) Boris is a serial entrepreneur who founded not only TNW, but also V3 Redirect Services (sold), HubHop Wireless Internet Provider (sold), and pr.co. Boris is very active on Twitter as @Boris and Instagram: @Boris.

Flickr has over 90 million geotagged photos right now. With all the smartphones (we need a new word for that!) with GPS and cameras on the market more and more photos are automatically geotagged.

So what would the world look like if you took these geotagged
photos and tried to figure out what countries look like based on just the Geotagged information? The smart people at Flickr did just that and plotted cities, countries and continents around the world. From the Flickr Blog:

“If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can”

The Flickr DevBlog also explains how to use their API to build your own geoTagged applications. Check it our for the images or to copy/paste the code samples to build your own cool stuff.