It may be hard to believe, but each day we post over 1.8 billion photos to the internet, thats over 20,000 a second! While many of these are likely to be selfies, there must be many millions of photos of everyday streets and urban places. Each of these photographs holds valuable data about the qualities of each street, but because this data is in a visual format it can be hard to analyse and make sense of the huge number of images that are being posted to social media every day.

However, in a recent collaboration between Walkonomics and researchers from Yahoo Labs (Daniele Quercia, Luca Maria Aiello and Rossano Schifanella) we have been able to begin to understand what millions of urban street photos can tell us about walkability.

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If you’ve ever used a navigation app to find your way through a city, then its very likely that the app only showed you the fastest route to your destination. Saving time is really important, but what if you could find a route that was fast and improved your mood?

The new updated Walkonomics app for iPhone and Android, can do just that. We’ve added navigation to Walkonomics, that will not only find the fastest walking route, but can also find the most beautiful route to any place in a city. Walkonomics does this by analysing over 1.7 million street trees, thousands of urban parks and over 46,000km of streets and footpaths.

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