The Eiffel Tower is the world's most photographed landmark... but London's Trafalgar Square comes a close second



Showing off your holiday snaps is part and parcel of a trip away. Now scientists have revealed the world's most photographed landmarks by studying millions of images using a supercomputer.



Experts at Cornell University analysed nearly 35million images posted by 300,000 users on the photo-sharing website Flickr.

The most photographed landmark in the top 20 most photographed European cities. London's Trafalgar Square, Manchester's Exchange Square, Bath Abbey and Edinburgh Castle were included

They discovered that while the Eiffel Tower in Paris was the most popular landmark, four of the top seven were in London.



Trafalgar Square, the Tate Modern and Big Ben managed second, third and fourth place, while the London Eye was sixth.



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Most photographed landmarks according to Flickr:

1. Eiffel Tower, Paris



2. Trafalgar Square, London



3. The Tate Modern, London



4. Big Ben, London



5. Notre Dame, Paris



6. London Eye, London



7. Empire State Building, New York

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Notre Dame in Paris was awarded fifth while the Empire States Building in New York was seventh.



Britain's capital city was the second most photographed city in the world after New York. San Francisco and Paris were third and fourth.



The researchers developed their technique using a supercomputer that crawled through a huge selection of photographs over a six-month period.



The most popular 20 landmarks in the British Isles

The image database was created after the computer picked a photographer on Flickr at random.



It downloaded any photos that were geotagged along with textual tags and geolocation. The photographers contact list was scanned and the process started again.



Popular landmarks were chosen by how many different photographers snapped them rather than by the total number of images in the database.



'It raises the intriguing possibility of an online travel guidebook that could automatically identify the best sites to visit on a vacation, as judged by the collective wisdom of the world's photographers,' a university spokesman said.

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10 most photographed cities according to Flickr:

1: New York, U.S

2: London, England

3: San Francisco, U.S

4: Paris, France

5: Los Angeles, U.S

6: Chicago, U.S

7: Washington, U.S

8: Seattle, U.S

9: Rome, Italy

10: Amsterdam, Holland

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They were able to breakdown the results to a regional level, revealing the 20 most popular photo stops in the British Isles.

The research, which was presented at the International World Wide Web Conference in Madrid, provides a new and practical way to automatically organize, label and summarize large-scale collections of digital images.



Director of the Cornell Centre for Advanced Computing David Lifka said: 'As the creation of digital data accelerates, supercomputers and high-performance storage systems will be essential in order to quickly store, archive, preserve and retrieve large-scale data collections.'