Wouldn't have expected the USA to be that much less touristy than Europe, though. And within Europe, western France seems to attract fewer photographs than even rurual Turkey.
Yeah, it's hard to deduce what the resolution of this heatmap is. I imagine the Alps are popular. But every square km like that? Seems rather unlikely... (very cool idea as mentioned though)
ETA. Based on http://www.panoramio.com/ -- I think a little bit of the skew in the Alps may have to do with panoramas counting for larger area (you can cover a lot more area from peaks in the Alps than say...at lower altitudes). The rest seems very legit. Very nice...
The map is based on the distribution of photos from http://www.panoramio.com, a photo-sharing website. The site was originally based in Spain, so perhaps there are relatively more photos from European users.
I think that it depends on what is being photographed. In rural Turkey, it will be toursists photographing each other, in Western France it will be tourists photographing the Eiffel tower.
Plenty of very highly visited areas are not that memorable by themselves other than that they receive a large amount of sunshine and this alone will attract large numbers of tourists from the North West of Europe.
Wouldn't have expected the USA to be that much less touristy than Europe, though. And within Europe, western France seems to attract fewer photographs than even rurual Turkey.