Revealed: the world's most photographed landmarks

The findings show that the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, which opened in May 2006, is more popular than many other well-known tourist sites such as St Paul's Cathedral in London, the Reichstag in Berlin and the Washington Monument in the US capital.

The store, which features a giant glass cube facade with a suspended Apple logo inside, is also the fifth most photographed landmark in New York after sites such as the Empire State Building, Times Square and Grand Central Station.

The research was published in a paper presented at the WWW 2009 conference in Madrid last week by a group of academics from Cornell University who had analysed 33,393,835 photos posted on the website by 307,448 users.