Mining User Home Location and Gender from Flickr Tags

Abstract

Personal photos and their associated metadata reveal different aspects of our lives and, when shared online, let others have an idea about us. Automating the extraction of personal information is an arduous task but it contributes to better understanding and serving users. Here we present methods for analyzing textual metadata associated to Flickr photos that unveil users’ home location and gender. We test our techniques on a sample of 30,000 people coming from six different countries, allowing us to compare results across cultures and point out similarities and differences.