Now, for all you fans of stats and photography, here’s a fascinating study on Flickr, as picked up by former BJP news editor Katie Scott at Wired, forever a source of good photography stories.

A map of the world’s most photographed landmarks on Flickr has been developed by a team from Cornell University. The extensive study consists of 35 million images – more than two terabytes of information, gathered over a six-month period on a supercomputer using embedded metadata.

Of little surprise is New York as the most photographed city, though the fifth most photographed location in New York is the flagship Apple store in midtown Manhattan – making it the 28th most photographed place on Earth, higher than the Washington Monument in the US capital. The Eiffel Tower tops the list.

London gets four of the top six landmarks, with Trafalgar Square the most popular and also placing 2nd in the world, with the Tate Modern, Big Ben and the London Eye the others. The full city list:
1 New York City
2 London
3 San Francisco
4 Paris
5 Los Angeles
6 Chicago
7 Washington, DC
8 Seattle
9 Rome
10 Amsterdam

The six degrees of separation theory comes to mind with this killer, and amazingly precise, quote from the team:

"We observe that if two users have taken a photograph within 24 hours and 100km of each other, on at least five occasions and at five distinct geographic locations, there is a 59.8 per cent chance that they are Flickr contacts"