I recognize Coit Tower and Alactraz here, and can see that Treasure Island affords a nice view, but there are also some concentrations closer to the center of the peninsula that are beyond my knowledge of the city.Ĭhicago: All things considered, Chicago gets my vote as the best skyline in the country. San Francisco: This city is made for scenic urban vistas.

New York has such an abundance of skyscrapers that it’s difficult to take in the whole skyline at once from the ground, but that’s no reason not to see the views that people are favoring along the East and Hudson Rivers. New York: The brightest lights here are observation decks (the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center), where one can view the skyline from the sky’s perspective. I did skip a few, but they tended to lack enough “skyline” tags to make for an interesting map. Here are some of the most photographed cities in North America, according to these guys. I even learned of a new spot to check out locally so it totally worked! There are no great insights that you can’t get from searching Flickr’s own maps, but it’s not bad for purposes like mine. They are done in a sort of heat map style where brighter red and yellow indicates a higher density of photos, but they are neither real heat maps nor real density surfaces rather they are many overlapping, mostly transparent dots, blurred a bit and mapped to a heat-like color gradient. Out of curiosity I threw together some maps to show where most of the skyline views are, as defined by photos tagged “skyline” on Flickr. But by now Flickr users probably have just about every vantage point covered, so a more fruitful search can be done by looking at geotagged photos. I can recall several years ago browsing Google Earth, panning around and tilting the view to see terrain and guess at good vantage points.

When planning to visit a new city, or even when looking to take some photos of a familiar city, I like to do some online scouting of good spots for a skyline view. City skylines are one of my favorite types of scenic view.

Cities skyline maps