Tatu Leppämäki
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tadusko.bsky.social
Tatu Leppämäki
@tadusko.bsky.social
98 followers 180 following 17 posts
PhD researcher @digigeolab.bsky.social, geographer, dog enjoyer.

tadusko@mstdn.social over on 🦣
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tadusko.bsky.social
BONUS ✨
Random highlights from the dataset:
1) Median time between capturing a photo and uploading it to Flickr is one week.
2) People (or bots) like to upload on round figures (see pic)
3) Normalized by population, Iceland has the most Flickr users in our dataset.
Uploads distributed per second of the minute and minutes of the hour. Only the first seconds and minutes diverge significantly, however, for the minutes, people like to upload on round figures (i.e., ten past, half past).
March 28, 2025 at 2:36 PM
tadusko.bsky.social
(5) Finally, we tested the reliability of data acquisition from the platform and found that the API responds inconsistently to repeated queries.
Outcome of 100 repeated queries to the API. The a pattern not unlike the normal distribution.
March 28, 2025 at 2:36 PM
tadusko.bsky.social
(4) All of this is reflected on who make posts from nature, or protected areas in this case. For example, Europeans and North Americans make about ¾ of the visits to African protected areas on Flickr.
Five 'chord diagrams'. They show connections between the origins and destinations of nature visitors at the level of continents. The majority of these visits are made in Europe and North America, especially as we get closer to present.
March 28, 2025 at 2:36 PM
tadusko.bsky.social
(3) Flickr is clearly a platform of the "Global North": it’s users and use are concentrated in Europe and North America. Over time, an even greater share of use is in Europe.
Three line charts and a map. They show how the majority of use is in North America and Europe, although normalized by population, Oceania prevails. At the same time, the spatial extent that is covered by Flickr photos has dropped. A global map of Flickr users normalized by population. Many in Northern Europe, Spain, UK, North America and Australia & NZ.
March 28, 2025 at 2:36 PM
tadusko.bsky.social
(2) More of that remaining data is produced by the most active ‘super-users’ of Flickr – top 1 % of users uploaded about 1 / 3 of the photos!
An area chart and a line chart. They show that few users posts the majority of geolocated pictures and that this imbalance has grown over time (expressed through Gini index).
March 28, 2025 at 2:36 PM
tadusko.bsky.social
What did we find? (1) the popularity of Flickr has dropped significantly over the 13 year study period. Especially the number of active users has seemingly taken a nosedive.
A set of four line and bar graphs that show the number of uploads and active users of Flickr has dropped for over a decade.
March 28, 2025 at 2:36 PM
tadusko.bsky.social
Flickr makes it easy to get geolocated data from anywhere. This has made it popular as a way to approximate people’s presence and preferences in research; think tourist movements, finding hotspots in a city, etc. not to mention that Flickr underlies many computer vision datasets and models.
Line and lollipop plots in one graph. Shows the fall in Flickr's popularity contrasted with the rise in publications using the data.
March 28, 2025 at 2:36 PM
tadusko.bsky.social
🚨 NEW ARTICLE 🚨
How many photos are uploaded to Flickr? Where? By who? Why does any of it matter? We explore the rise and fall of #Flickr in this @digigeolab.bsky.social paper by yours truly, @vuoggis.bsky.social, Johanna Eklund, Anna Hausmann & @tuulitoivonen.bsky.social out now!
buff.ly/0hJjPsm
Distribution of the use of Flickr. Three heat maps that show globes roughly centered in Europe and Africa, South-East Asia and the Americas. Use is centered in Europe and North America, and urban areas.
March 28, 2025 at 2:36 PM
tadusko.bsky.social
The "Valeriepieris Circles", as they are named in this paper: doi.org/10.1111/gean...

Iceland is a really extreme example, though.
Figure 1 from the linked paper. A map of Europe that shows the Valeriepieris circles for each country of Europe.
February 18, 2025 at 7:56 AM