A general Google Image search on Berlin sights brings up pages and pages of images of most of the places tourists visit. Many of these have been uploaded to the web by organizations or tourism companies, but I'm sure that the majority have been posted by the tourists who took them. From my cursory examination, it's pretty clear to me that searches for specific sights also bring up at least tens of photographs each. Obviously, it's possible to tour Berlin from your computer screen.

And we can continue our tour well after we've returned home. This past month I've been receiving "recommendations" from Google+ that obviously knows that I've been to Berlin, and thus "assumes" that I'm interested in that topic. These recommendations are to collections of photographs connected to Berlin, some with numerous street scenes, others with only a couple of photos tagged Berlin within larger collections. And while Google Image Search doesn't tell me the number of photographs they've found that "match" my search, Flickr tells me that it has about six and a half million photos tagged Berlin and almost 60,000 tagged Brandenburg Gate - which doesn't include those uploaded by photographers who can't spell.

And all this, of course, raises once again the question of whether there's really any reason for me to add my own photographs to what's already a pool that's too large for anyone to attempt to seriously examine.