I saw a story recently that said
Dreamstime had identified Kiev as the 15th most photographed city in the world. That surprised me. as I had expected a lot of other cities to be much higher in terms of tourist destinations than Kiev.
I couldn’t find the original Dreamstime story in order to see who they had as number 1, but I found a lot of other lists of top cities and top travel destinations. They were all differed depending on who put together the list. I found one list of “25 Most Photographed Cities in Europe” and Kiev wasn’t on it.
I decided to search
Shutterstock’s collection of 216,094,727 images to see which were the top cities with the most photos. See the list of the 64 cities I chose below. Los Angeles, not New York as I had expected, is at the top of the list.
New York was second, but that could include pictures of New York state. When I searched for “New York City” there were only 573,177 images with all three keywords. That put both Bangkok and Moscow ahead of New York City in terms of most photographed.
That seemed surprising until I remembered that there are more photographers from Thailand contributing images to Shutterstock than photographers from any other country in the world according to a
Microstock.top survey I reported on a couple years ago. In terms of the number of images in the collection the top producing countries were the Ukraine, Russian Federation and Thailand in that order. The United States was a distant 4th.
Thus, one of things we need to conclude from this list is that the number of images available doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with demand for images of a given location. Rather, it is determined by the number of photographers trying to license the images they produce of the location. It would be very interesting to know how many images of a given city have actually been licensed in a given year, or in the last several years, but no one wants to tell photographers that. So the photographers just keep shooting and producing more great images that no one wants.
Photographers ought to look at the number and quality of the images already available and ask themselves if what they are about to post is really any better than the images already there.
Also, if your images are added to a collection of this size is there really much chance anyone will ever look at them? How long before they are buried so low in the search return that no one will find them? Sure, if they are new to the collection they may stay near the top for a little while. But, how long? A week, a day, an hour?
The image may be of a specific location or monument within the city that can be identified with additional keywords, if the specific subject is what the customer is searching for, but how many images are there of that unique subject?
If a photographer’s purpose in uploading images to a site where potential buyers might see them, is to try to earn money from the images, then it might useful to spend a little time checking out the competition before expending all that energy.
| Number |
City |
Images |
| 1 |
Los Angeles |
1,015,943 |
| 2 |
New York |
851,954 |
| 3 |
Bangkok |
783,894 |
| 4 |
Moscow |
620,791 |
| 5 |
London |
512,749 |
| 6 |
Paris |
434,374 |
| 7 |
Rome |
289,021 |
| 8 |
Tokyo |
277,506 |
| 9 |
Venice |
275,528 |
| 10 |
Istanbul |
270,181 |
| 11 |
Hong Kong |
249,338 |
| 12 |
Singapore |
239,290 |
| 13 |
Barcelona |
222,998 |
| 14 |
Kiev |
209,238 |
| 15 |
Prague |
198,816 |
| 16 |
Berlin |
180,896 |
| 17 |
St Petersburg |
164,495 |
| 18 |
Dubai |
158,712 |
| 19 |
Amsterdam |
147,465 |
| 20 |
Beijing |
135,350 |
| 21 |
Shanghai |
129,389 |
| 22 |
Budapest |
126,044 |
| 23 |
Madrid |
122,337 |
| 24 |
Seoul |
112,101 |
| 25 |
Lisbon |
111,176 |
| 26 |
San Franciso |
106,734 |
| 27 |
Florence |
100,978 |
| 28 |
Rio de Janerio |
99,663 |
| 29 |
Athens |
94,481 |
| 30 |
Jerusalem |
93,976 |
| 31 |
Vienna |
93,845 |
| 32 |
Brussels |
89,851 |
| 33 |
Porto |
89,259 |
| 34 |
Warsaw |
82,715 |
| 35 |
Sydney |
82,408 |
| 36 |
Munich |
77,003 |
| 37 |
Stockholm |
71,013 |
| 38 |
Valencia |
68,484 |
| 39 |
Cape Town |
62,352 |
| 40 |
Chicago |
62,224 |
| 41 |
Melbourne |
61,635 |
| 42 |
Krakow |
58,258 |
| 43 |
Sao Paulo |
44,268 |
| 44 |
Montrael |
44,106 |
| 45 |
Bucharest |
40,234 |
| 46 |
Mumbai |
39,905 |
| 47 |
Copenhagen |
39,013 |
| 48 |
Salzburg |
38,802 |
| 49 |
Seattle |
35,467 |
| 50 |
Granada |
34,047 |
| 51 |
Verona |
30,171 |
| 52 |
Dublin |
29,947 |
| 53 |
Monaco |
28,922 |
| 54 |
Cairo |
28,412 |
| 55 |
Buenos Aires |
23,807 |
| 56 |
Jakarta |
23,704 |
| 57 |
New Delhi |
22,484 |
| 58 |
Honolulu |
22,228 |
| 59 |
Monte Carlo |
17,046 |
| 60 |
Fira |
16,255 |
| 61 |
San Sebastian |
11,452 |
| 62 |
Nairobi |
7,975 |
| 63 |
Brasilia |
6,471 |
| 64 |
Bogota |
6,184 |