64 million +
There are over 64 million images in the National Geographic Image Collection, and over half of them were taken in the U.S. or its territories. In order to whittle those down, we decided we needed to feature at least three images of each state or territory, at least one of those images would be paired with a story from a noted resident, and the entire book would be organized around geographic regions and themes from the original poem America the Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates. Also that is Taylor Swift’s sparkly guitar, but I didn’t know that until the captions came in.
