Description

A Google Earth KMZ file containing polygons in a latitude/longitude grid and labelled with the number of Flickr photographs they contain.

Updates

09/09/2006: I added clickable icons to the labels layer; you can see the bounding box used to calculate the number of pictures as well as a clickable link to view that area on a Flickr map page.

Methodology

  1. Obtain a latitude/longitude grid in shapefile format (hint: one comes with ESRI's ArcGIS).
  2. Use Perl, Flickr::API, and Geo::ShapeFile to send 64,800 requests to Flickr's flickr.photos.search method.
  3. Export resulting data in CSV format.
  4. Open this CSV in Excel, export to DBF.
  5. Join this DBF to the original latitude/longitude grid shapefile in ArcGIS.
  6. Export to Google Earth with KMLer.

Caveats

Update, 09/09/2006: The problems I noted with the data were partly my fault (0-based index vs. 1-based index error) and partly Flickr's (though they have since greatly improved the results returned by the web API.

Update, 09/09/2006: I noticed that the web API still isn't returning all of the data; check North and South Korea for an example of this.

I'm not quite sure about the accuracy of the data Flickr's webservice is returning; if I'm to believe the results it returned there are only 10,197 photos that have been tagged with an accuracy of 8 or greater (out of ~2.5 million at the time I collected my data). Accuracy level 8 is between "Region" and "City" according to the flickr.photos.search documentation. There also seems to be a couple of odd horizontal stripes where images show up that don't correspond to areas that you'd think would have high photo activity. In addition, I noticed while searching for photos in Seattle that they did not appear in the bounding box containing Seattle but rather the bounding box directly to the north of it.

Data

You'll need Google Earth to view these files.

Contact

beau@beaugunderson.com