The stunning maps that show the most photographed parts of every city (and how to avoid tourists)



For London it's Westminster and the London Eye. For New York, the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.

Every world city has its must-see sights and every monument and skyscraper is photographed and documented by countless tourists.

Now a computer programmer has used photos that have been uploaded to the internet to create a fascinating record of the difference between the pictures taken by tourists and locals in the same city.

Eric Fischer started his project by downloading as many locations and date-stamps of city locations using photos taken from photo-sharing websites such as Flickr and Picasa.

London shows a cluster of red around the Southbank and looking back at the bridges along the Thames

Paris shows a clear strip along the Champs Elysee

He then drilled down further into this information and sorted the pictures by photographer and city.

He then categorised the photographers into either ‘locals’ or ‘tourists’.

‘If a given photographer took pictures dated over a fairly continuous period of a month or more within one city, I considered them to be a local of that city,’ he said.

‘In any other city where they seemed to spend less than a month, I considered them a tourist.’

Once he had categorised the two groups in this way he wrote a computer program which would plot all of the geo-tagged photos on the map and colour-code them according to their habits.

Tourists were red, locals were coloured blue while those which could fall into either camp were designated yellow.



New York shows most tourists have taken photos in North Manhattan but there is also a distinct area around the Statue of Liberty

The result is these incredible satellite images of familiar cities. In New York a cluster of red forms around the Statue of Liberty at the foot of Manhattan.



And in London, the banks of the Thames are deep red as tourists take their obligatory shots of the London Eye and London Bridge.

Unsurprisingly the Eiffel Tower is one of the most-photographed areas in Paris while Tokyo's disparate centres show patches of red scattered throughout the city.



Mr Fischer does not believe that there is fundamental difference in where tourists and locals take their pictures.

He said: ‘I think that tourists are mostly just limited in the information that they have and the time they have to spend exploring, so they don't make it very far away from the places that the guidebooks recommend to them, while locals already saw those highlights long ago and don't feel the need to take more pictures of them.’

Sydney shows a clear blue line along to the south of the city and another cluster at the famous Bondi beach

Tokyo's lack of a defined city centre results in an interesting spread of clusters of shots taken across Shibuya, Shinjuku and other popular areas

Las Vegas is unusual in that nearly every photo is taken by a tourist



