toronto skyline

Toronto's skyline is one of the world's most photographed

If your social feeds are littered with pics of the Toronto skyline, there's a pretty good reason. According to a new report, our city's iconic skyline ranks among the most popular in the world for photographers.

Delving into the relevant hashtags for 128 cities across the globe, image monitoring platform Pixsy determined the most popular city skylines on Instagram, and Toronto ranks among some real heavyweights, landing the #6 spot and coming in among the top four per cent of cities.

Hashtags like #nycskyline and #londoncityscape were used to measure the average number of posts, and the results were then cross-referenced against each city's population and annual visitors.

Among the five cities to beat out Toronto's over 143K skyline posts were expected global destinations like New York, Chicago and London, which rounded out the top three. Toronto landed just behind Boston and Jakarta, with over 184K and 176K posts respectively.

It's a ranking that would have been surprising just a few decades ago, though towering glass condos have since filled in the gaps between older skyline icons like the CN Tower, Old City Hall and Fairmont Royal York.

But it seems that our global standing isn't everything, with two other metrics ranking Toronto reasonably low for a city of its stature. Among the cities most photographed by tourists, Toronto was a dismal 13th place with 0.005 posts per visitor.

And for the distinction of the city most photographed by locals, Toronto came in even worse at 14th place with just 0.012 posts per resident, worse than objectively less photogenic places like Kansas City.

Here's the full ranking:

  1. New York City, New York, USA – 768,226 posts
  2. Chicago, Illinois, USA – 313,502 posts
  3. London, UK – 269,786 posts
  4. Boston, Massachusetts, USA – 184,353 posts
  5. Jakarta, Indonesia – 176,012 posts
  6. Toronto, Canada – 143,440 posts
  7. Dubai, United Arab Emirates – 134,035 posts
  8. Frankfurt, Germany – 118,690 posts
  9. Dallas, Texas, USA – 94,083 posts
  10. Seattle, Washington, USA – 89,202 posts
  11. Miami, Florida, USA – 77,892 posts
  12. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA – 66,533 posts
  13. Los Angeles, California, USA – 58,610 posts
  14. Singapore – 58,352 posts
  15. Atlanta, Georgia, USA – 51,335 posts
  16. Hong Kong – 45,189 posts
  17. Sydney, Australia – 43,157 posts
  18. Houston, Texas, USA – 38,891 posts
  19. Melbourne, Australia – 36,729 posts
  20. Nashville, Tennessee, USA – 31,958 posts
Lead photo by

Berkay Gumustekin


Latest Videos



Latest Videos


Join the conversation Load comments

Latest in City

Here's why a huge 300-ton Toronto crane is actually a protected heritage structure

Toronto's forthcoming artificial island just got a new name

Toronto's biggest free Halloween party was a beautiful disaster

Canadians could soon cash in on $8.5 million TD mutual funds settlement

Ladybugs that bite and spray stinky fluid are taking over Ontario homes right now

Toronto reacts in shock as Doug Ford moves to cut bike lanes from downtown streets

Canada's dollar drops to lowest level in years and here's how it'll affect you

Canadian businesses could soon cash in big thanks to $2.5 billion in carbon rebates