Edinburgh’s most photogenic locations

Maps

Where in Scotland’s capital are you most likely to take a photograph?

The world knows Edinburgh is a beautiful city: split between the 16th-century Old Town and the 18th-century New Town, bookended by a castle and a palace, nestled under an extinct volcano.

That’s the tourist’s city at least. It also has a dark side, a Jekyll and Hyde personality, and was the set for Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Some parts aren’t so pretty.

So what does Edinburgh look like to its photographers? This image shows a single red dot for each of the 42,658 photos on Flickr taken in 2011 and geocoded at the highest accuracy (level 16). I’ve highlighted the most obvious clusters:

There’s the curious case of very few photos taken from Arthur’s Seat and Holyrood Park. I wonder why there are so few accurately-geocoded photos taken there?

So now you know either where you should take photos or how to avoid taking the same old shots as everyone else.

Base map my own work using OpenStreetMap data from mid-February 2012. Urban area taken from the Scottish government’s urban-rural classification of 2010.