Nine thousand tags... and counting: Vancouver ice hockey fans race to ID themselves in amazing crowd 'stitch' photo for Facebook record attempt


A sea of ice hockey fans mass in downtown Vancouver for the last game of this year’s Stanley Cup finals.

It’s undoubtedly an impressive sight – but it’s actually a crafty photo-editing trick. The image is actually made up of 218 different pictures taken over period of 15 minutes.

Nevertheless, it has captured Canadians’ imagination. Fans of the city’s team, the Canucks, have been racing to identify themselves in for a Facebook ‘tagging’ record.

The bigger picture: Fans are trying to identify themselves from this image, which was made by stitching together 218 different photographs taken over a 15-minute periiod

The process of tagging involves using the social networking website and clicking on individual faces that you recognise.

So far, the picture has been tagged more than 9,500 times – already greater than the current record of 7,000 revellers at last year’s Glastonbury music festival in Somerset.

However, organisers hope to hit the 10,000 mark and, in order to make record official, Guinness organisers will have to ascertain that all each tags is made by a single individual as you can only identify yourself.



Sea of faces: Vancouver Canucks fans mass. Can you see yourself here?

Scrambling for a view: fans climb up see over the crowd. They include some of the more than 9,500 people who have tagged themselves on Facebook



Where's Wally? A close of up some of the faces gathered in the Canuck Fan Zone in downtown Vancouver ahead of the final Stanley Cup game in June 15

Also among those looking intently at the IDs might be the city’s police force, which is investigating a riot after the June 15 game following the Cannucks’ loss to the Boston Bruins.

During the violence, shop windows were smashed and cars were set on fire. More than 100 people were arrested for breaching the peace or public intoxication.

It is unknown whether any of the culprits were among the fans captured by Gigapixel photographer Ronnie Miranda.

To create the image she stretched a total of 218 images together in a grid of 12 across by 18 down.

The end result was a massive 2,110 megapixels image.



Why police may be interested: Hours later riots began when Vancouver lost the NHL title. It may be that some of fans tagging themselves were those who caused trouble