• Russia is big.  Canada is also big, but most of its area is unpopulated and pictures are few and far between.  By contrast, Siberia actually has a fair number of people sprinkled across it and is surprisingly well photographed.  (Also, by land area, Canada is actually #4 in the world, not #2.)

• China is big.  Also, as you might expect from the most populous country on Earth, pretty much every time the algorithm landed in China, there was a settlement nearby.  It was similarly a given that any time it landed in India there would be a settlement nearby, but India is much smaller than China.  It may be the 7th-largest country in the world, but there is a huge gap between #6 and #7: #6, Australia, is more than 2½ times India's size.

• China is as polluted as you think.  Even to someone who grew up in Southern California, it was alarming to look at random pictures of China and see how the subjects were almost invariably swallowed up in thick pinkish-gray murk.

• Brazil is big.  It's larger than the contiguous U.S.  However, a fair amount of it is covered with very poorly photographed jungle.  Sadly, this may not be an issue for too much longer, as most of the time the algorithm landed in the Amazon rainforest, deep branching scars ran through the frame.

• The Sahara is big.  It is also better photographed than sub-Saharan Africa.  The South American jungle is exhaustively documented compared to its Congolian counterpart.

• Australia is even emptier than the statistics suggest.  Its population is concentrated in the state and national capitals; outside those, its population density is almost exactly one person per square kilometer — one third the population density of Siberia, and less than that of Siberia even with all Siberian cities removed.  When you randomly pick a spot in Australia, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a barren stretch of outback.

• If Antarctica really did look like geotagged pictures make it look, it would be a very interesting place!  Lush forests, rolling grasslands, sunny beaches, and of course gorgeous coastal cityscapes all over the place, right down to the South Pole.  Maybe after global warming really kicks in.  For now, the lesson is that a lot of people don't know how to geotag.

• There's a whole lot of ocean out there.

The queue for 2014 is nearly full already — I keep about a forty-week buffer — and it's been interesting to see how things have incrementally changed since the beginning of the year.  More pictures are getting geotagged these days, so while it's still mostly scenery and landmarks, there are a few oddities in store.

Among the odder places the algorithm picked in 2013:

• A resort in Namibia where Angelina Jolie apparently stayed before heading up the road to give birth

• A chaotic cemetery in the middle of the Chilean desert

• A monument in Kazakhstan to a type of long-necked sheep

• A geothermal plant south of Mexicali

• An art installation in the middle of the Sahara!

• A somewhat kitschier piece of art playing on the name of its location: Gladstone, Manitoba

• The tallest chimney ever built! (It's in Kazakhstan and dates to the Soviet era)

• Also from the Soviet era, and by far the most popular item of the year, a monument to the 24th Tank Corps

• Industrial dystopia in Saudi Arabia.  I was also struck by this… quarry?… in Nigeria

• I think the biggest metro area the algorithm pulled up was Montevideo, Uruguay; it landed in the harbor

• At Antarctica's Pole of Inaccessibility is an abandoned Soviet research station that is now just a bust of Vladimir Lenin sticking out of the snow at the bottom of the world

• I was really looking forward to seeing how people would react the day the algorithm managed to pull up a dinosaur. (From a dinosaur theme park in Poland)

• Did you know that there's a place in Tajikistan called "The Districts of Republican Subordination"?

• A Uyghur knife factory

• A temple in India devoted to rats, and home to thousands of them; I saw some pictures of the inside and came close to retching

• Possibly the most memorable picture of the year was what appears to be a Nigerian slum built around an open sewer. A reminder that even the very poor in the U.S. are, by global standards, quite rich

• You know that when the location tag includes phrases like "Free Zone" and "buffer strip" the picture is likely to be something

• It's always fun when the thing lands on a tiny little island — click through to the map and see how unlikely that was

• Without the human figure, I would have no idea what the hell was going on in this picture from Severny Island.  Meltwater running through a glacier, I think?

• tails
  
• rabies
  
• horns
  
• wings
  
• shark teeth
  
• gills
  
• cat eyes
  
• two heads
  
• worms
  
• clothes

Thanks!