Users on popular photo-sharing website Flickr have been found to actually be creating maps of their surrounding areas, experts have recently announced. Making use of the site's “geo-tagging” service, which allows uploaders to specify the location where their picture has been taken, a research team has tried to stitch images together, to get a larger one of various cities and landscapes across the globe and to determine which spot is the most photographed in the world.

The investigation team, made up of experts at the Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, and led by David Crandall, has analyzed more than 35 million snapshots that were uploaded to Flickr and tagged with the coordinates of the spot where they were taken. The goal of the action has been to create accurate global and city maps, as well as to identify the most popular sites for photographers. NewScientist reports that New York City came on top, being the most photographed city in the world.

Strangely enough, it is London that has had four of the most-viewed spots – Trafalgar Square, the Big Ben, the Tate Modern art gallery, and the London Eye. Even stranger, the investigation has revealed that, of all the places in NYC, the Apple store in midtown Manhattan is the fifth most popular, which has been fairly unexpected, with objectives such as the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and many others. Crandall made a full presentation of the results this week, at the WWW 2009 conference in Madrid, Spain.

Coming up with the results has not been easy, the team say. The researchers had to divide the maps into clusters, and then find all the photos that had a geotag that matched those locations. They eventually had to visually check each of them out, to look for common spots, and to discover trends that finally gave them an idea as to what places were the most popular among photographers. Some share that this is a wondrous achievement, which has been only made possible through the emergence of large-fan-base sites that allow massive amounts of data to be uploaded.