Every country in the world in 1 (Unsplash) photo

I wanted to demonstrate the power of my splashmark image markup script and did the following experiment using splashmark, Wikipedia, and Unsplash:

• I got a list of all countries in the world (via kalinchernev/countries, but I cleaned it up a little)
• for each country, my script searched for the most popular image in Unsplash. E.g. for Belgium, it is a photo by Alex Vasey of the city of Dinant (almost 4 million views, 37000 downloads):

• The script then used splashmark to resize and crop the original size of the image to a square 800×800 size (“Instagram style“), added the name of the country as a big title, and added the photo attribution info (URL/photographer), burnt into the photo (top and bottom right), as well as embedded in the image meta-data EXIF/IPTC info. This makes that attribution info pop up automatically when you use the photo in Facebook or WordPress, as you will see below.
• The result is 195 images for 195 countries that should/could be representative for each. The definition of “most popular” image for Unsplash seems to be “most downloads”.
• The end result is here: splashing.forret.com/topic/country

I will give you some highlights:

Tourism posters

A lot of countries are represented by exactly the image you’d expect. France: the Eiffel tower, Australia: the Opera house on Sydney, Japan: Mount Fuji …

Photo: Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash.com

Photo: Dan Freeman on Unsplash.com

Photo: David Edelstein on Unsplash.com

Photo: Marcin Nowak on Unsplash.com

Photo: Fatih Yürür on Unsplash.com

Photo: Swapnil Bapat on Unsplash.com

Photo: John Lee on Unsplash.com

Photo: Oliver Schwendener on Unsplash.com

Photo: Ammie Ngo on Unsplash.com

Photo: Adrien Olichon on Unsplash.com

People

For some countries, the most popular Unsplash photo is a person.

Photo: mohammad alashri on Unsplash.com

Photo: Angelo Moleele on Unsplash.com

Photo: mulugeta wolde on Unsplash.com

Photo: Olhar Angolano on Unsplash.com

Photo: Partha Narasimhan on Unsplash.com

Photo: Mohammed Eissa on Unsplash.com

Photo: Wil Amani on Unsplash.com

Photo: James Tay on Unsplash.com

Random technology

Unsplash depends on the content provided by its photographers, and sometimes the most popular photo for a country has little to do with that country and more with the photographer who happened to provide the photo. E.g.: a Sony camera for Afghanistan, a Mi Note phone for Botswana, an old MacBook with a random website for Rwanda.

Photo: nasim dadfar on Unsplash.com

Photo: Emin Sefiyarov on Unsplash.com

Photo: Toro Tseleng on Unsplash.com

Photo: mustapha kasule on Unsplash.com

Photo: One zone Studio on Unsplash.com

Photo: Old Youth on Unsplash.com

Random military

I was surprised to find that the most popular Unsplash photo for Hungary was not of the Parliament in Budapest, not of the Balaton lake, but some military parade.

Photo: Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash.com

Photo: chetan sharma on Unsplash.com

Random nature

Nature can be beautiful, but sometime sit can also be very generic. Some countries have as most popular Unsplash photo a random piece of nature.

Photo: Pema Gyamtsho on Unsplash.com

Photo: Daniele Franchi on Unsplash.com

Photo: Lesly Derksen on Unsplash.com

Photo: L’odyssée Belle on Unsplash.com

Photo: Bekky Bekks on Unsplash.com

Photo: Héctor Emilio Gonzalez on Unsplash.com

Photo: Mohamed Sadiq on Unsplash.com

Photo: D.H.F edits on Unsplash.com

Photo: Filip Zrnzević on Unsplash.com

View from above

It would be hard to choose a representative picture for a country like the USA, and the Unsplash community seems to have chosen a view from above: a picture from NASA. Photo: NASA on Unsplash.com

Photo: USGS on Unsplash.com

Conclusion

I enjoyed this experiment and will be doing more in the future. In the meantime, if you want to easily work with photos (your own or those from Unsplash) on the command-line, check out splashmark on Github!