Map Of Most Photographed Areas Of Iceland Assembled

Data has been gathered from thousands of publicly available photographs to chart the most photographed areas in Iceland.

The map used data from the National Land Survey of Iceland and the boundaries of all protected areas in Iceland from the Environment Agency of Iceland. Then 144,000 photographs from Flickr that included GPS information taken between 2012 and 2014 were used to set points on the map.

Grapevine spoke with Árni Geirsson of Alta Consulting, who presented the map to attendees at last week’s Tourist Assembly in Akureyri, to explain a little bit about the points on map (the full-sized version of which can be seen here).

The red and yellow dots indicate locations considered highly and moderately attractive, respectively, as places for tourists to visit. This data was crowdsourced from some 300 Icelanders working in the tourist industry, selected by the Icelandic Tourist Board from a pool of nominees from municipalities around the country.

Where photographs were taken, a transparent blue dot is put on the map. As more photographs are charted, they begin to stack up, changing their color from lighter blue to a darker shade. This animated GIF displays these points by month of the year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the summer months are an especially busy time for photography.

An interactive version of the map can be found here. By clicking on any given ring on the map, the sidepane provides a brief description of the location. While this description is in Icelandic, you can scroll down to where it reads “Myndir á Panoramio” and click there to see sample photographs taken at that location.

There is also another map which may be of special interest to fans of the Icelandic sagas. Every ring represents a place mentioned in the sagas, and clicking on a ring will show what the place is, what saga it is mentioned in, and the pertinent quote from the saga that makes the mention. If you just want to check a particular saga, you can select it from the dropdown menu at the top of the sidepane.