A year of sunsets

Flickr has a lot of sunset photographs. Too many, some would say.

To build this graph I collected just a few of them, by searching for photos that have been tagged “Sunset”.

I collected only 100 photos from the hundreds posted each day of the preceding 365 days, so that the photos are evenly distributed across the past year. There are over 35,000 photos shown in the graph.

I positioned each photo horizontally according to the day it was taken, and vertically according to the hour it was taken.

By making each photo translucent, I created a “hot spot” which shows when the most photos were taken, each day of the past year.

The bright band shows the approximate time of sunset for each day. You can see that as the year progresses, the time of the sunset changes.

The deepest dip in the band corresponds to the summer solstice (about June 22), and the highest part of the band corresponds to the winter solstice (about December 22).

This is the second time I’ve graphed the curve of the sunsets using Flickr sunsets. The first time, over a year ago, I used all the photos then available, which produced a more inconsistent looking graph.

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Comments

krazydad / jbum says:

Original version from Feb 18th, 2005:

Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

bikeracer says:

This is very cool!
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

otherthings says:

You've done it again, Jim! This is pure awesomeness.

What do you think causes all the noise scattered around the rest of the graph? Cameras with clocks set to the wrong time zone maybe? (I assume you're already throwing away photos with no EXIF...) Or are they just photos tagged with "sunset" that aren't actually sunsets? (e.g. Sunset Boulevard?)
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

jared says:

Incredible! Great work Jim. Did you somehow translate timestamps from UTC to local time zones? Or is this additional evidence that Flickr is mainly an American affair.
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

Here are my guesses

1) If EXIF data is present, Flickr uses it, and stores it literally (which will typically be in local time of the photographer).

2) If the user specifies a 'time taken' for the photo, Filckr also assumes it is localtime of the photographer

3) If date/time information is not present, Flickr makes the date_taken the same as the date_uploaded.

4) #3 happens a lot, which accounts for most of the noise.

5) Other noise may be due to photos tagged 'sunset' which weren't actually photographs of the sunset. e.g. "sunset grill"

One could prove that Flickr is presenting the time information in the photographer's local time by filtering for geotagged photographs which were taken in Europe - I am guessing these will have the curve in the same general area...
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

By the way, a sunrise graph will follow in a few hours...
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

bikeracer says:

how about: full moon

=]
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

bikeracer says:

also, could you make your script throw out shots where the date/time taken is equal to date/time uploaded and scrape some more?
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

Wha? You allergic to noise or something? :)
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

psd says:

This is a really cool because you can in part verify the subject to the camera's clock. I had a brief experiment with trying to group a pool of photos, but had to fiddle with timezones and clock-skew:

blog.whatfettle.com/2005/12/01/clustr-flickr- pool-timeline
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

Mike Pedroncelli says:

If it's all local time shouldn't there be steps for daylight savings time (at least in the US)?
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

Hughes Léglise-Bataille says:

Very cool and interesting ! Look like the Milky Way somehow ;-)

--
Seen on your photo stream. (?)
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

Hmmm... good point Hugo. I'm still inclined to think there would be a wider spread if it were GMT... guess I'll have to do a geographic test...
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

OpheliaChong says:

aha. i should go back and not tag that image "sunset grill"....

:O)
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

bikeracer says:

I'm a dummy, I didn't realize you'd already done full moons. Duh!
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

BIkeracer: I actually did the full moons in response to your request. Only took about 20 minutes...

Here's the results of my test to see if the times are stored either in UTC or GMT:

Looks like the times are indeed roughly local to the photographer. It is still unclear why there isn't a more visible artifact from daylight savings. Perhaps many cameras don't deal with DST correctly?
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

otherthings says:

My camera certainly doesn't handle DST automatically. And I can't be bothered to change the clock on it twice a year. I'm sure a lot of Flickr users feel the same way.
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

Personally, I wish that DST would just go away. So annoying - both as a programmer, and as a human.
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

jonanamary says:

My mind is officially blown. Flickr people love their sunsets ...
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

jared says:

Jim, are you suggesting that programmers aren't human? ;)
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

I'm pretty sure many of them wish they weren't... :)
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

bikeracer says:

eating, sleeping, bathing. all are things that bother programmers (and WoW players) so much they consider abdicating their species.
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

taka_itaha says:

> You can see that as the year progresses, the time of the sunset changes.

Actually the average time of the sunset on Earth is each day the same. The visible change in this picture is only because more people from the northern hemisphere photograph sunsets and post the photos to flickr. For one thing because the vast majority of people is living on the Northern hemisphere.
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

otherthings says:

Good point, taka_itaha! Jim, you could try searching for "sunset" translated into other languages used in the southern hemisphere, like Spanish or Portuguese or Afrikaans or something...
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

Or I could use flickr's lovely bbox feature to retreive sunsets geotagged in the southern hemisphere, as I did here...

Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

caffeineandpixels says:

Wow, you have managed to take something completely right brained and turned it into a graph, which is completely left brained. Could you compare a chart like this or of the lunar cycles to the moods of women or perhaps stock purchases or lotto numbers? Wait, maybe you could do one of all the photos of Trekkies and then compare it to the number of guys in their 30's still living with their mothers. I'm just razzing you, of course. This is really amazing. It's like finding a Mayan sun calendar or something like that.
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

Yeah, you've kind of discovered my M.O. :)
Posted 37 months ago. ( permalink )

Ti.mo says:

A long time ago I mapped my photographs by date against time (and location), the results of which were personally very meaningful. Great to see the technique on this huge dataset!
Posted 36 months ago. ( permalink )

apurdam (Andrew) says:

As a southern hemispherical person, my immediate interpretation of this was "what? no pics in the southern hemisphere?"
I guess we are there as the bigger spread of dots during the solstices (solsti?). Of course, our sunset times agree with the northern hemisphere during equinoxes.

In fact, by the vertical spread of the data, you should be able to calculate the population distribution according to latitude.
... if you really wanted.

Nice work!
Posted 36 months ago. ( permalink )

squarepants2004j/auntyhuia says:

Wow...a lot of work has obviously gone into that! Very good!!!
Join in our group...
flickr.com/groups/34845647@N00/
Posted 36 months ago. ( permalink )

killaypetshop says:

apurdam. You noticed the difference in curve between Europe and Pacific as well. Latitude is everything. btw we have daylight saving time here in UK as well and its a real pain. I suggest very few people change their camera's clock - I know I don't.
Posted 36 months ago. ( permalink )

elbisreverri says:

this is awesome
Posted 36 months ago. ( permalink )

Peon Peetie says:

this is great! nice idea

--
Seen in Flickr Hacks (?)
Posted 36 months ago. ( permalink )

Mr.Child♫ says:

i really love this picture. i blogged it here.
Posted 36 months ago. ( permalink )

Joequbik says:

Cosmic
Posted 34 months ago. ( permalink )

Nick Bramhall says:

That is such a brilliant use of all that data here on Flickr! Great job.

As for DST I celebrated the other day as I'm finally back in sync with my camera's clock - I never changed the time last October to account for the end of BST!
Posted 32 months ago. ( permalink )

redcord says:

At last, a use for all those sunsets. Bbox is a great tool.
Posted 32 months ago. ( permalink )

８−ＢｉｔＦｕｊｉｋｏｎ。 says:

that is cool!
Posted 25 months ago. ( permalink )

mmmauricio says:

Great great great!!!
Posted 21 months ago. ( permalink )

sasi_nisha_shyaam says:

aaaha, excellent work. i appreciate the data collection.
Posted 16 months ago. ( permalink )

kutiekate26 says:

I dont get how you came up with this, how do you know what time and day the pictures were taken and I dont see what the data is suppissed to show and why. Not critisizing, i just want to understand, I dont get it lol
Posted 15 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

Kate:

The graph shows what time of day these pictures (tagged "sunset") were taken. The pictures are positioned on the x-axis according to the day of the year, and on the y-axis according to the time-of-day.

I'm getting the date & time information for each photo from flickr, it's one of the pieces of information that flickr can provide about the photos people store on it. If you look on the right-hand column for each photo, you'll see something that says "Taken on November 8, 2006". Flickr actually allows you to specify more accurate information, down to the specific hour, minute and second for each photo, and many digital cameras automatically embed this information into each photo.

As far as what the graph shows - the most obvious thing it shows is that the time most sunset photos are taken follows a sinusoidal curve pattern which is closely correlated to the time of sunset over the course of the year, in the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere. It also shows that many sunset photos on flickr do not have correct metadata.
Posted 15 months ago. ( permalink )

Eli the Bearded says:

FWIW: I do not reset the clock in my camera for DST, and I don't reset them when traveling between timezones. So the pictures I taken in Singapore and in New York are all timestamped with my home time, not localtime. I expect that sort of clock skew is common and will contribute to some of the noise.
Posted 13 months ago. ( permalink )

Lynn Morag says:

Remarkable!

...And I forget to change my camera clock too when I travel between timezones (so about 5 hours out)

Seen in a discussion of CM
Posted 13 months ago. ( permalink )

George Bitsanis says:

hey man that is absolutely awesome :) i red the five question thing and that's how i ended up here and i've got an idea that might help with that thing you said about "instant photojournalism" so here goes...
what if while viewing this image (a year of sunsets) i could zoom in to a region of say 1hour by 1day and see graphical respesantations of the raw data (images) that were simultaneously live i.e. i could link through them to the individual sets! anyway your work is cool just as it is cheers man
Posted 13 months ago. ( permalink )

gertys says:

Well done! Way to "crowdsource" art! I have couple of humble suggestions for more:
-- "Fireworks" (major holidays may pop out)
-- "New Years Eve" & "fireworks" (a way to separate timezones?)
-- "Lunar eclipse" vs. "Solar eclipse" (probably could go back many years)

I found this thread after seeing your 5 questions also, which I'd imagine is the cause for the sudden bump after a 2-month lag. Sorry if you've tried these already but I couldn't resist the chance to weigh in. Great job!
Posted 13 months ago. ( permalink )

killaypetshop says:

Now I want to know "what 5 questions?"
Posted 13 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

Gertys was referring to this:

code.flickr.com/blog/2008/10/14/5-questions-f or-jim-bumga...
Posted 13 months ago. ( permalink )

killaypetshop says:

Hey -thanks for link. Interesting stuff.

Two further questions:

1) Can you point me in the direction of how to manually geotag my photos?

2) Why do you have bananas on your head in your photo?

<I don't really expect you to answer the second one>
Posted 13 months ago. ( permalink )

krazydad / jbum says:

Killaypetshop: How to manually geotag your photos:

1. Go to the photo's page.
2. Click on the link on the right that says "Add to your map"
3. Select the location the photo was taken on the map, and then press the "Add to my map" button.

To answer the second question, I took the photo for a very cool Flickr group called "Green Banana Hats", which contains photos of people wearing... Guess!

I used the photo to make this cool poster, over at FD's Flickr Toys:

Posted 13 months ago. ( permalink )

killaypetshop says:

Yay I got it working - thanks. Took several attempts but I finally realised I needed to go to "organizr" and then it worked.
Posted 13 months ago. ( permalink )

Anthony Thyssen says:

One thing that has not been mentioned is the relative thickness of the bar.

of course sunset photos will be plus or minus some time from the actual time of the sunset, but what no one has mentioned is that accross any particular time zone that actual REAL time of the sunset is plus or minus 30 minutes of the time for that time zone.

That is someone on the eastern side of a time zone will experience sunset almost an hour earlier than someone on the western size of the time zone.

So any particular photo (if the time is set correctly on the camera) will be +/- 30minus and +/- some time around sunset, lets also say about 30 minutes!

Then means the photo could be +/- 1 hour of the actual time, and that corresponse to a bar thickness of anout 2 hours.

Looking at the chart that is about the average thickness of the main bar!
Posted 4 weeks ago. ( permalink )

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A year of sunsets

Comments

krazydad / jbum says:

bikeracer says:

otherthings says:

jared says:

krazydad / jbum says:

krazydad / jbum says:

bikeracer says:

bikeracer says:

krazydad / jbum says:

psd says:

Mike Pedroncelli says:

Hughes Léglise-Bataille says:

krazydad / jbum says:

OpheliaChong says:

bikeracer says:

krazydad / jbum says:

otherthings says:

krazydad / jbum says:

jonanamary says:

jared says:

krazydad / jbum says:

bikeracer says:

taka_itaha says:

otherthings says:

krazydad / jbum says:

caffeineandpixels says:

krazydad / jbum says:

Ti.mo says:

apurdam (Andrew) says:

squarepants2004j/auntyhuia says:

killaypetshop says:

elbisreverri says:

Peon Peetie says:

Mr.Child♫ says:

Joequbik says:

Nick Bramhall says:

redcord says:

８−Ｂｉｔ Ｆｕｊｉｋｏｎ 。 says:

mmmauricio says:

sasi_nisha_shyaam says:

kutiekate26 says:

krazydad / jbum says:

Eli the Bearded says:

Lynn Morag says:

George Bitsanis says:

gertys says:

killaypetshop says:

krazydad / jbum says:

killaypetshop says:

krazydad / jbum says:

killaypetshop says:

Anthony Thyssen says:

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８−ＢｉｔＦｕｊｉｋｏｎ。 says: