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Tracing Toronto With Photos
Eric Fischer is the Internet’s latest mapping superstar. Using geotagging data from Flickr and Picasa, the thirty-seven-year-old programmer and California resident recently generated a series of maps to visually illustrate major cities’ most heavily photographed areas.
Fischer has applied his technique to dozens of locations, including London, Paris, Montreal, and yes, as you can see above, even Toronto. So far, he’s created two map sets: the “Geotaggers’ World Atlas” set, which uses location data and timestamps to plot photographers’ speeds and paths, and the “Locals and Tourists” set, which divides shutterbugs into, well…locals and tourists.
Eric Fischer’s “Geotaggers’ World Atlas” map of Toronto. An extra-large version of the map is available here.
In the “Geotagger’s World Atlas” set, black represents walking (anything less than seven miles per hour); red’s bicycling, or something similar (less than nineteen miles per hour); blue’s cars on regular roads (less than forty-three miles per hour); and green’s even faster modes of transportation, like highways or subways.
In the “Locals and Tourists” set, a photographers’ city photos are compared to the rest of their geotagged images. If their photo collection is primarily from out of town, they’re classified as tourists (red dots). If their collection has multiple images from the same city that have been taken over a period of months, then they’re classified as locals (blue dots). Yellow dots represent inconclusive photos, and the lines between the dots delineate the paths of the photographers.
“My original theory behind the Geotaggers’ World Atlas was that clusters of geotagged pictures would identify the parts of cities that their residents cared the most about,” Fischer told Torontoist. “I imagined, pictures being taken meant, first of all, the presence of people, and, second, [that] people…saw something they thought was interesting.” Fischer added the speed calculation in order to explain the photos taken from inaccessible locations like “car-only bridges or out in the water,” and to differentiate images taken on foot from other methods of transportation, like cars, bikes, or ferries. After he released the first set, Fischer found to his surprise that people were interpreting his maps purely as a visual representation of tourism, so he created “Locals and Tourists” to test that theory.
In Toronto’s case—like most of the maps—photos by local photographers (74,802) dwarf those by tourists (14,899).
To Fischer’s dismay, some publications, like Gawker and the Wall Street Journal, have framed his maps as guides on how to avoid tourists. “My interest is in finding places to go to, not places to avoid,” he explained. “If people want to try to avoid tourists, they can do that, but I think most places would benefit from having more tourists walking around, not fewer.”
While Toronto’s “Locals and Tourists” map accurately depicts standard tourist hot spots like Casa Loma, the ROM, and the CN Tower, what it really reveals is the unpopularity of the former boroughs among both out-of-town and local photographers.
Images courtesy of Eric Fischer.