25 Most Photographed Cities

Using GPS data – both manually and automatically entered -- 500px has put together a selection of beautiful images from the 25 most photographed cities of the world. These images are worth enjoying.

500px has over 50 million images in its collection, from 6+ million contributors, but only about 2,792,692 of them from about 150,000 of the 6+ million contributors are available for licensing through the 500px Marketplace section of its site. To see all the images on the site for any subject or category go to https://500px.com/flow/curate.

The images not included in Marketplace have been posted by photographers who are interested in showing their work to others and learning which images others “love,” but so far at least, these photographers are not interested in licensing rights to their images at 500px prices.



When 500px originally set up its Marketplace (initially referred to as Prime) they offered the images at flat rates of $50 for web resolution, $250 for print resolution and $750 for a product for resale. We have no indication how well these images are selling at these prices.

However, in August they launched a separate, edited section of the site called Core. The prices for Core are $35 for web resolution, $150 for print resolution, and $300 for products for resale. Basically, they took something in the range of 90% to 92% of the images that had been priced at Prime rates and lowered the prices to the Core level based on what they had been learning from many of their customers.



The remainder of the images are still referred to as “Prime” and they remain priced at the original prime levels ($50, $250 and $750). 500px says they will be closely monitoring the activity of both collections. From time to time some images may be moved from Core to Prime while other images that have been in Prime may be dropped down to the Core pricing level.

Regardless of which collection the photos are licensed from, the photographer still receives 70% of the net fee of every license sold.

In the following chart I’ve put together a comparison of the number of images of each of the 25 Top Cities. The first column provides the number of images of that search term in the entire 50+ million image collection. Next is the number for just the Marketplace collection followed by the Core portion of Marketplace and the Prime portion of Marketplace. I’ve also provided counts for 10 other large cities that weren’t included in the top 25. Considering that Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland made the top 25 list, I’m surprised that some of the other cities weren’t included in the top 25.

		500px Choices					Alamy	Shutterstock
		All 500px	Marketplace	Core	Prime
1	New York, NY, USA	333,174	28,817	26,206	2,611		853,445	239,030
2	Paris, France	323,136	22,777	21,163	1,614		523,302	160,236
3	London, UK	312,543	25,004	23,381	1,623		2,795,421	198,029
4	Toronto, Canada	108,206	9,343	8,785	558		168,033	25,198
5	Singapore	104,227	8,936	8,095	841		106,821	53,364
6	San Francisco, California, USA	117,796	10,390	9,471	919		137,887	32,660
7	Rome, Italy/Vatican City	112,261	9,929	9,170	759		280,796	93,282
8	Chicago, Illinois, USA	80,789	6,817	6,488	329		122,113	22,792
9	Venice, Italy	96,267	11,193	10,271	922		232,523	98,091
10	Amsterdam, Netherlands	70,125	6,665	6,322	343		106,993	37,606
11	Tokyo, Japan	86,934	7,691	7,207	484		257,179	48,057
12	Istanbul, Turkey	159,635	11,179	10,623	556		114,705	69,646
13	Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland	399	47	33	14		495	112
	All of Iceland	124,950	17,831	14,926	2,905		123,235	49,885
14	Moscow, Russia	168,118	6,960	6,437	523		239,424	159,405
15	Seattle, Washington, USA	60,537	5,248	4,870	378		62,304	10,148
16	Milan, Italy	54,069	2,928	2,757	171		157,318	71,805
17	Kiev, Ukraine	22,019	1,587	1,422	165		67,116	76,953
18	Sao Paulo, Brazil	78,636	1,921	1,812	109		34,700	10,496
19	Lisbon, Portugal	58,053	5,100	4,773	327		92,485	25,908
20	Vienna, Austria	50,308	3,606	3,368	238		94,416	27,714
21	Vancouver, Canada	66,039	6,000	5,441	559		113,115	33,240
22	Taipei, Taiwan	38,800	1,821	1,712	109		49,193	14,594
23	Barcelona, Spain	122,903	8,049	7,593	456		236,545	83,605
24	Montreal, Canada	55,237	3,064	2,895	169		53,890	16,390
25	Florence, Italy	42,630	3,503	3,241	262		75,494	29,810
		2,847,791	226,406	208,462	17,944		7,098,948	1,688,056
	Los Angeles	72,054	4,926	3,725	1,201		1,812,803	655,628
	Hong Kong	82,268	7,172	6,545	627		132,343	64,542
	Beijing	40,357	3,291	3,046	245		253,701	50,489
	Shanghai	45,045	2,943	2,748	195		91,264	42,044
	Berlin	123,447	8,362	7,839	523		752,347	65,319
	Miami	36,991	2,589	2,440	149		190,260	38,375
	Dubai	82,768	6,875	6,306	569		77,174	37,002
	Jerusalem	19,184	1,860	1,737	123		97,155	25,468
	Rio de Janeiro	42,651	2,240	2,117	123		60,317	30,251
	Mumbai	29,174	2,004	1,887	117		39,829	4,180
		573,939	42,262	38,390	3,872		3,507,193	1,013,298

Since 500px’s often refers to its 50+ million images and that number is very close to the number of images on Alamy or Shutterstock, I have included the figures for all the same searches on both of these sites.

It is also important to note that if you do a search at https://prime.500px.com/search/ you get quite different figures compared to a search done at https://500px.com/search. For example, when I conducted a search for New York City at the first location I got 14,340 images in “All” (the entire collection), 1,031 for Prime and 62,833 for Core. They don’t add up. At least the searches of https://500px.com/search did add up.