Lonely Planet community blog

Your photos of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum didn’t turn out as you had hoped: they’re mostly pictures of the backs of other people’s heads as they crowded to get a glimpse of the famous artifact. The romantic photo of you and your fiancée in front of the Eiffel Tower contains not only the tower but nine other couples doing roughly the same thing, two chatting policemen, and a mime on a smoke break.

If you’re an avid traveller, not only do you undoubtedly have photos like these with potentially unwelcome interlopers, but you’ve almost certainly interloped yourself, becoming one of the many unwitting extras that populate the vacation photos of travellers around the world. Thorn Tree user emmanuella posed an intriguing question on this topic on a recent thread: Do you think there might be a way to trace yourself in other people’s photos?

We’ve all done it. Last week I accidentally ruined a stranger’s photo twice in a row. A photographer was lining up a shot of a long hallway at Fort Point in San Francisco’s Presidio, and I happened to step into the hallway just as the camera flashed. I needed to walk back through the hallway to exit but didn’t want to ruin his second attempt, so I waited a moment and then peeked around the corner to see if he was gone — just in time to have my head in his photograph once again.

Most of the time, however, you have no idea that your picture is being taken. You could be a member of a large tour group in Moscow’s Red Square and have your photo taken by dozens of strangers. You might be reading the newspaper at an outdoor café in Segovia while tourists take snapshots of the architecture. Or, if you’re very unlucky, you could be touring a temple in Taiwan when you’re suddenly crushed from a distance by a pair of large fingers wielded by an especially malicious photographer. If you were so inclined, how could you ever find these photos?

This is a challenging problem, but perhaps it’s not insurmountable. One suggestion in the thread was to search for pictures of events you attended in the past. You could always try a reverse approach like one user who posted a picture of a stranger and asked is this you in Jufureh in mid-February 2004? An enterprising Flickr user created a group called Other People’s Vacation Photos but, while it’s an amusing diversion, it hasn’t brought about a single identification so far.

Given the rapid evolution of social networking tools and photo sharing with tagging, georeferencing, and face recognition, perhaps we’re converging on a solution to this problem already. Facebook and other platforms support tagged photos, so you can find pictures of friends and family in photo albums uploaded by people you barely know or often don’t know at all. Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa can use face recognition to populate a set of photos with tags, but this technology is not especially precise and is as yet only applied to small personal photo sets, not, for example, the entire Picasa collection. Will we soon be able to find ourselves in the photographs of complete strangers?

[Photos: Rosetta Stone crowd, by miche11e; Crushing poor, unsuspecting tourists - by eraine]

Hide 8 comments

1. July 10, 2009 nog_boinb Report this comment

   Great post. It’s something I’ve often thought about (and on more boring travelling days, done: somewhere out there are about 50 photos of me ruining the perfect shot of Prague’s Astrological clock by poking my head in at the vital moment).

2. July 10, 2009 seenashark Report this comment

   Something on topic happened to me in my hometown of Wellington, NZ several years ago. I was at a festival and took a photo of a fire-eating performance or similar. Naturally, there were tons of people in the background. A few weeks later, I was sitting in a café and a couple I’d never met came up to me and said “We saw you at the festival, we think we’re in a photo you took. Can you please send us a copy?”. I went home and looked, and indeed they were right! Could only happen in a town of that size…

3. July 11, 2009 newislander Report this comment

   Interesting point and comment but who would have the time to do this. Perhaps if we tattoo our names on our foreheads or wear T-shirts wearing our names, we might have more success.

4. July 14, 2009 nthorpe Report this comment

   You need to use the “Tourist Remover” .http://www.snapmania.com/info/en/trm/ .. you send them a couple of photos of the famous location where you need the (ahem) removal, and BINGO, bye bye Ricoh-snapping, flower-print intruders. Seriously. It’s real.

5. July 18, 2009 Andy Murdock Report this comment

   I love the Tourist Remover concept – I suppose you could do the same with Photoshop, but it’s a clever (and kind of funny) idea.

6. July 19, 2009 billco Report this comment

   Interesting idea, but the likelihood of locating my photo in somebody else’s photo album seems near impossible, regardless of the technology.

   Now removing other people from my photos … that could work.

7. August 12, 2009 blackangel Report this comment

   I like the idea of wearing a T-shirt with our name on it or even an email address for this purpose only, but it’s kinda boring when we have to wear the same thing everyday

8. September 1, 2009 lucy76 Report this comment

   When my eldest son was a baby, we lived in China and Hong Kong..he was six months or so, big blue eyes and blonde curls…WE WERE LIKE CELEBRITIES!!! Countless Chinese took his pic, and pics with him..he is now 19..we always laugh and wonder where all those pictures are, and WHY he was a little tourist attraction!!