Sightseeing World Heat Maps

Sightsmap is a heat map of the world based on the number of photographs submitted to Panoramio.

The heatmaps are based solely on the number of available Panoramio photos for an area. The dark and the blue areas have fewer photos, the red areas have more and the yellow areas have a large number of photos geotagged.

As you zoom in on an area on the Google Map the heat map becomes more detailed and map markers appear for Wikipedia entries for locations and Foursquare venues.


Alexander Tchaikin has an interesting project on building photo density maps based on Panoramio photograph submission. The project's goal is to show on Google Maps the number of photos geo-tagged at particular locations. For example, the screenshot above shows the areas being photographed most in Paris.

Alexander explains how he created these photo density maps on his project website. He also has a number of kml files, so you can review the results of his analysis on Google Earth.

Google Maps Photo Browser

Photo Browser

Sadly the new Photo Browser photo layer doesn't appear to be available in the Google Maps API. However because the Photo Browser used in Google Maps is based on Flash you could grab the address of the Flash file for a particular Photo Browser and embed it in a map.

I've just had a quick look at the Panoramio API and created a slideshow that will load a photo into the Google Maps Photo Browser (without a map). To load a photograph into the browser just click on the next and back arrows thumbnail.

Although there is no map associated with this little app if you look at the source code you should be able to work out how you could add a Photo Browser to a Google Maps mashup.

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Pegman Is Promoted

Pegman has been given a big promotion in his role of guide on Google Maps. Now, as well as showing you where Street View is available, Pegman will tell you where you can view user contributed photographs.



When you drag pegman over Google Maps blue dots will appear on the map where user contributed photographs are available. You can still tell where Street View is working because Street View availability is shown with blue lines.

If you drop Pegman on a blue dot you will then be able to view the photogrpahs at this location with the Google Maps photo browser.



Via: Google LatLong

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The World's Tourist Hot Spots

World Tourism Map

This heat map of the world is color-coded by level of 'touristiness', based on analysis of photos on Panoramio. Yellow indicates high levels of tourism, red indicates medium tourism, and blue low tourism.

Areas with no photos at all posted to Panoramio are grey. The map was produced by bluemoon.ee.

Remote Places Map

This Google Map purports to show the world's most interesting remote places. Again the map has been produced by an analysis of photographs uploaded to Panoramio, this time with a little help from analysing city names with GeoNames.

Yellow areas are very remote places with high tourism interest (e.g. Antarctica), green less so (e.g. mountains of New Zealand), and blue even less so (e.g. central Yucatan). Grey areas have no Panoramio photos or are not remote at all (e.g. New York City).

Again, the map was produced by bluemoon.ee.

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