About ScenicOrNot

What is this site?

It’s a game — pit your aesthetic judgements against other users, and discover the lovely and not so lovely corners of the UK.

Where are all the pictures from?

The lovely people at Geograph.

Why did you build it?

We want to gather a freely available nation-wide dataset of scenicness, to use for a secret project.

Can I download the data generated by this site?

Sure, we’re happy to make the data available for other people to use under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3 Licence.

votes.tsv is a TSV file of all photos that have been rated 3 times or more. The columns are ID, latitude, longitude, average rating, population variance, the votes (comma separated), and the Geograph URI for the photo; the file updates weekly.

There are 217,000 images (one for each of nearly 95% of the 1km grid squares in the UK), and we’re making sure each one is rated 3 times by different people, to help limit abuse, or the impact of people with terrible taste.

What if a photo is unrepresentative of the scenicness of a grid square?

At first, there’s nothing we can do. When we hit 651,000 plays we can add a different photo for each grid square, and hopefully that will help even out bad photos.

Who built it?

This site was built by The Dextrous Web for mySociety.

How do I get in touch?

Email team@mysociety.org.