If you’ve ever wondered what the most visited tourist destinations in India are, here's a highly conclusive list, derived from a dataset that’s nearly 11 years old. Data scientists at Flickr have provided us with a definitive list of the top 10 tourist hotspots in India, by crunching geotag data of all the photographs ever taken in India and uploaded on the site.
EXIF metadata is uploaded with every photo on Flickr, which allows all kinds of data analysis. We previously reported on the most popular cameras of 2014, but what's more interesting is what users click.
Flickr has one of the largest repositories of geotagged photos on our planet. Just their Creative Commons dataset has over 48 million photographs that cover 249 different territories, including countries and islands around the world. According to the latest reported stats, Flickr has a user base of over 92 million users, who upload over a million photos every day.
The top 10 list spans a wide range of terrain, from religious sites, caves, hill stations, backwaters, deserts to luxury hotels. A quick note on the findings — the numbers you’re seeing next to each location are percentages. So for example, out of all of the photos that were taken at the 10 destinations, 40.8% of those were taken at the Taj Mahal, and so on.