Researchers at Cornell University in New York have undertaken a project to determine which world landmarks tourists photograph most often.
The team parsed through the nearly 87 million pictures on photo-sharing site Flickr to analyze the geographical coordinates of the snaps because they noticed a trend of geo-tagging (attaching the latitude and longitude to photos that are uploaded online) offered a new means of creating tourist itineraries.
As might be expected, the most often tagged monument was the Tour Eiffel in Paris. The world’s most popular city according to the number of tags was New York. Surprisingly, Italy’s photogenic monuments fell farther down the list behind the city of Seattle.
According to the geo-tagging analysis, Italy’s most commonly photographed landmark was the Colosseum in Rome, followed by Ponte Vecchio in Florence and Piazza San Marco in Venice.
