Where Do Tourists Go? Visualizing and Analysing the Spatial Distribution of Geotagged Photography

Visualizing the geographical positions of photographs taken by tourists is a promising method to measure tourist activity in urban spaces. Most photo-sharing sites on the Internet offer the possibility of “geotagging” photos, resulting in geographical information retrievable by databases using the application programming interface (API) of such sites. These data sets can be visualized on maps or digital globes, which make the correlations of the photo density and the geographical objects of a given area expressive. It is possible to differentiate pictures taken by locals from those of visitors by examining the temporal distribution of a specific user's photos. Resulting maps revealed interesting correlations between the tourist attractions of the area and the number of photos taken there. In the case study of Budapest tourists took photos only in the areas around main tourist attractions. In contrast, locals also photographed recreational spaces or interesting sights not advertised for tourists. The development of recreational infrastructure is also visible in the case of the most recent projects.