TIME ranks Tel Aviv Sixth ‘selfiest city in the world’

Any social media devotee knows that selfies – self-portrait snapshots – have been a hit long before Ellen DeGeneres snapped the record-breaking celebrity selfie at the Oscars. TIME Magazine downloaded more than 400,000 Instagram photos tagged “selfie” that included geographic coordinates to produce a list of the Selfiest Cities in the World. Israel made the top 100 with Tel Aviv ranking sixth place.

Makati City in the Philippines is the Selfie Capital of the World with 258 selfie-takers per 100,000 people, according to TIME Magazine.

Trying to replicate DeGeneres’s success, even Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu posed for a selfie with Israeli soldiers near dozens of mortar shells and rockets seized from the Panama-flagged KLOS C civilian cargo ship.

And shortly after TIME’s rankings were correlated, Israeli selfie-app CamMe won Most Innovative Mobile App at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014 thus ensuring the smartphone self-portrait trend to continue and expand.

It seems, however, that the Top Five snap happy places, according to TIME, are Manhattan (202 selfie-takers per 100,000 people), Miami (155 selfie-takers per 100,000 people), Anaheim and Santa Ana (147 selfie-takers per 100,000 people) and Petaling Jaya in Malaysia (141 selfie-takers per 100,000 people).

The magazine downloaded photos from the Instagram API in two sets of five days: from Jan. 28-Feb.2, 2014 and Mar. 3-7, 2014.

TIME admits that its study is far from perfect but said counting photos tagged “selfie” that also included a geographic location was the only way to create a database.

There are 459 world cities included in the database.