Pie charts show dramatic color changes in European photography from country to country

Programmer and photographer Jack Mahoney and his friend Eric Hartsuyker, decided to make use of data from EyeEm (a photo sharing site popular in Europe) to see how the colors in photographs change across Europe. With the help of some clever programming and queries to the photo-sharing platform, the two dug up HSL (hue, saturation, luminance) information and turned it into pie charts of color frequency, broken up by country.

After figuring out how best to make use of public APIs from EyeEm, the pair finally stumbled across the best option. It wasn’t exactly efficient, but it got the job done. Once they gathered the color information, the pair used GoogleCharts to visualize the data.

It was after seeing the results that the pair realized just how dramatically the color palettes differed from country to country. Specifically, Mahoney said in his blog post:

Comparing the blues and greens of oceanic Iceland to the greys and blacks of alpine Andora provide some interesting insights.

Below is an image of the graphs for the 48 countries analyzed:

The project is still a work in progress, but with some tweaks in mind for future iterations, the information could become far more reaching, showing differences not only between countries, but across continents as well. There’s even mention of a possible poster down the road.

We can't wait to see something similar for our Lightroom catalogs: Imagine analyzing how your photographs' color palettes change across time and location.

To check out the graphs in full size and read more about their process, head over to Mahoney's Medium article here.