Makati and Pasig named as Selfie Capital of the World by Time Magazine

Written By Funchum on Tuesday, March 11, 2014 | 10:35:00 PM

Selfies are more fun in the Philippines after Pasig and Makati named as the "Selfie Capital of the World"

Photo by Time.com

Time Magazine made a database of over 400,000  instagram selfies and found out that the two cites have the most number of selfies having 258 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

Makati City, known as the financial center of the Philippines, can now boast another distinction: It is the Selfie Capital of the World.An examination of hundreds of thousands of selfies—the low-fi, self-shot photographs that are intensely popular among younger social media users—suggests that the city, part of metropolitan Manila and home to 500,000 people, produces more selfies per capita than any other city in the world.To investigate the geography of selfie-taking, TIME built a database of more than 400,000 Instagram photos tagged “selfie” that included geographic coordinates. In total, we ranked 459 cities to determine the selfiest places on earth - Time.com

The article said that the photos were downloded from the Instagram API in two sets of five days: from Jan. 28-Feb.2, 2014 and Mar. 3-7, 2014. Each day’s data consists of the 24-hour period from midnight to midnight to account for all time zones equally. During that time, 402,197 Instagram photos tagged “selfie” that included geographic coordinates. For every city in the world of at least 250,000 residents, we then counted the number of selfies taken within 5 miles and divided by the population of that city. 

Also, according to to Chris Wilson not all photos tagged as selfie are in fact selfies. They ran a test in their database using out-of-the-box facial detection and found out that the majority of photos were of a single person. Added by Wilson Photos were matched to cities using a simple "nearest neighbor" algorithm that found the nearest city with atleast 250,000 residents.

According to the study , the top ten countries with most selfies are:

1. Makati City and Pasig City, Philippines: 258 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

2. Manhattan, NY, USA: 202 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

3. Miami, Fla., USA: 155 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

4. Anaheim and Santa Ana, Calif., USA: 147 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

5. Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: 141 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

6. Tel Aviv, Israel: 139 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

7. Manchester, England: 114 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

8. Milan, Italy: 108 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

9. Cebu City, Philippines: 99 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

10. George Town, Malaysia: 95 selfie-takers per 100,000 people

Cebu also make it to the top ten havng 99 selfie-takers per 100,000 people while Baguio is in 16th with 82 selfie-takers. Quezon city and Iloilo are also among the top 100 listed

Souce: Time Magazine

A selfie is a type of self-portrait photograph, usually taken with a hand-held digital camera or a phone. Selfies are often associated with social networking like Facebook, Twitter of Instagram. They are often casual, are typically taken either with a camera held at arm's length or in a mirror, and typically include either only the photographer or the photographer and as many people as can be in focus.