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Apple Store One of Midtown's Top Photo Spots

By DNAinfo Staff on June 2, 2011 9:54am

By Jill Colvin

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

MIDTOWN — The Apple store is giving Times Square and Rockefeller Center a run for their money when it comes to drawing the attention of digital shutter-bugs in Manhattan.

While the classic tourist hotspots remain two of the most-photographed locations in the borough, the glass-cube Fifth Avenue iPad emporium is making quite the impression, according to an analysis by Oakland, California-based software engineer Eric Fischer.

Fischer, 38, developed his rankings of the most-photographed sites by culling photo-sharing sites Flickr and Picasa, which allow users to tag photos with the locations where they were taken.

"When I first found out that Flickr was letting users add location information to the pictures, it immediately seemed clear that some places were getting photographed a lot more often than others and that those were probably the places that people visited the most often and found the most interesting," Fischer said in an e-mail.

Blue pictures were taken by locals, red pictures by tourists.
Blue pictures were taken by locals, red pictures by tourists.
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Flickr/Eric Fischer

His map of New York’s hottest spots contains data from a whopping 2,505,511 photos, posted online as long ago as 2004, "allowing a pretty clear view when they are all taken together of what places people find the most interesting," he said.

The top-10 photo sites in Manhattan? Times Square, City Hall, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller Center, Fifth Avenue near 53rd Street, Madison Square Garden, the Museum of Natural History, the Met Life Building and the famous Fifth Avenue Apple store, he said.

He noted that some large landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge get shortchanged by his methodology because people photograph it over a long distance rather than from a single point.

In addition to the landmark sites, the map also shows particularly heavy photo-taking in Central Park, Midtown and Downtown, with a clear uptick along Broadway.

A second map Fischer created differentiates between photos taken by tourists and photos taken by locals.

Not surprisingly, the tourists' photos are concentrated in Midtown, Central Park and Downtown (especially near Ground Zero), while locals tend to do most of their snapping capturing fun times in the East Village, the West Village and on the Upper West Side.

Fischer said he was particularly struck by differences on the city's bridges, with Brooklyn Bridge heavily photographed by tourists, while the other bridges are snapped mostly by New Yorkers.

The project is reminiscent of a 2009 study of 35 million photos by Cornell University researchers that found New York is the most-photographed city in the world.

The most photographed sites in Midtown.
The most photographed sites in Midtown.
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Flickr/Eric Fischer

Back then, the Apple store ranked as the fifth most-photographed place in the city and the 28th most-photographed place on Earth, meaning the box's appeal may be fading.