It is very rare for me to read about photography on blogs that have to do with computer science and programming, but this week I came across a very interesting study that combines computer science and picture organization methods. The study was done by Cornell University faculty and students and was presented at the 2009 edition of the International World Wide Web conference. It was entitled “Mapping the world’s photos” (See resources at the end for the PDF link).
EXIF and IPTC are a powerful combination.
Here is another quote from the paper that shows what results can be obtained from combining EXIF and IPTC image metadata. This really shows that when you combine EXIF (geotags and time information) and IPTC (keywords and maybe geolocation) you can obtain powerful results…if you know how to put it all together and interpret it correctly.
As researchers discovered a decade ago with large-scale collections of Web pages, studying the connective structure of a corpus at a global level exposes a fascinating picture of what the world is paying attention to. In the case of global photo collections, it means that we can discover, through collective behavior, what people consider to be the most significant landmarks both in the world and within specific cities; which cities are most photographed which cities have the highest and lowest proportions of attention-drawing landmarks; which views of these landmarks are the most characteristic; and how people move through cities and regions as they visit different locations within them. These resulting views of the data add to an emerging theme in which planetary-scale datasets provide insight into different kinds of human activity — in this case those based on images; on locales, landmarks, and focal points scattered throughout the world; and on the ways in which people are drawn to them.
Top ten most photographed cities in the world
Ten most used city tags in Flickr pictures:
- newyorkcity
- london
- sanfrancisco
paris
- losangeles
- chicago
- washingtondc
- seattle
- rome
- amsterdam
Top seven most photographed landmarks on Earth
I will only present one more of their findings here, namely the most photographed landmarks. You can see all the other findings in their paper (see resources at the end). Seven most used tags on images of tourist attractions:
- eiffel – Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.
- trafalgarsquare – Trafalgar Square in London, England
- tatemodern – The Tate Modern museum in London, England
- bigben – Big Ben in London, England
- notredame – Notre Dame in Paris, France
- londoneye – The Eye in London, England
- empirestatebuilding – The Empire State Building in New York.
Conclusion
It is obvious that when dealing with such quantity of pictures free programs and even consumer software is not adequate. However, with the proper tools, we can see how powerful EXIF and IPTC image metadata can become if used together. And guess what: maybe my own Flickr pictures have been used in this study ! So, have become part of some very cool statistics…or even better my pictures have become really important 
Resources:
D. Crandall, L. Backstrom, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg. Mapping the World’s Photos. Proc. 18th International World Wide Web Conference, 2009 (PDF). Professor Kleinberg’s page at Cornell University.
Pages: 1 2
Recommended reading:- How to use your image geotags in Flickr
- 2 simple examples of using image geotags
- Image metadata terms definition
- The best history lesson on image metadata standards
- Understand and manage your image metadata
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