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Applying social media data in researching protected area visitors can be useful in minimizing their impact on the biodiversity. An increased social media activity can be expected in national parks due to the growing nature-based tourism and the increasing use of social media. The tourism in national parks can lead to an impact on the area’s biodiversity, resources, and environment. In this work, we study the possibilities Flickr data offers for conservation science, while aiming to provide methods for further research. We describe the dataset in multiple ways and examine the link between the accessibility and the frequency of social media posts. We create and utilize a script to merge geotagged social media point data with national park polygon data and global accessibility data, calculate social media post densities in national parks, and summarize them at the national and regional levels. We study point patterns in Sub-Saharan African national parks and create a kernel density raster layer of the Flickr posts in the region. Finally, we perform a cursory analysis of the linguistic content of the Flickr posts globally. Our results do not show a clear correlation between the Flickr post density in national parks and the accessibility from the nearest population center globally, which signifies a need for a regional examination or for a more sophisticated accessibility dataset. We find clear clusters of Flickr posts inside most Sub-Saharan national parks and have examples of national parks with concentrated and dispersed Flickr post distribution, although clustering is much more prevalent. Our linguistic analysis demonstrates the dominant role of English in Flickr …