One image shows the crowd on the National Mall at Trump’s inauguration Friday. It’s the photo where you can see lots of white — what appear to be tarps — covering the ground.(Looking for credit info)

Look at the two photos below:

Overhead photos appear to show a smaller turnout for Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday than Barack Obama drew in 2009, when he was sworn in for his first term as president.

The other image is the crowd that turned out for Obama’s 2009 inauguration. (Credit to Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

Globe political reporter Matt Viser also tweeted the images on Friday.


The crowd size comparison, from 2009 and today. pic.twitter.com/iMYZy9PRK8 — Matt Viser (@mviser) January 20, 2017

News website Vox has another comparison of Friday’s crowd and the one that turned out in 2009.

Aerial images reveal a stark difference in crowd size at Trump's #inauguration versus Obama's in 2009. pic.twitter.com/asyPecPlvv — Vox (@voxdotcom) January 20, 2017

The Associated Press reported Friday that “crowds on the National Mall, where people without tickets could view the inauguration on video screens, grew steadily throughout the morning. But less than two hours before the swearing-in, there were still wide swaths of empty space.”

Counting crowds at major public events is difficult, and estimates can vary widely.

Estimates of the size of the crowd that gathered on the National Mall for Trump’s inauguration were not immediately available Friday afternoon.

At least one estimate of Friday’s turnout is not expected until Monday, the AP has reported. That estimate will come from Christopher Geldart, the District of Columbia’s homeland security director.

The 2009 crowd, by one widely-reported estimate, was 1.8 million people, which was believed to be the largest inaugural crowd in history.

But Steve Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State University who specializes in measuring crowd sizes, told the AP that based on an analysis he had done, he estimated there were just 800,000 people in the crowd for the 2009 inauguration.

To see more photos from Trump’s inauguration, click here.


To see more photos from the 2009 inauguration, click here.

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Matt Karolian of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Matt Rocheleau can be reached at matthew.rocheleau@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mrochele