You don’t even need to be on Instagram to understand just how popular these spots have become. Once bucolic hideaways are now mobbed with day-trippers looking not so much for a relaxed afternoon in the sun as they are hunting for the perfect portrait – ones they have already seen online.

In some cases, the popularity of these social media hotspots has shed new light on previously neglected spaces. But in others, the stream of visitors can result in absurd situations.

The Sai Wan Swimming Shed is a particular scenic place where a rustic wooden pier juts into the churning waters of the East Lamma Channel. Project manager for a local tech firm Justina Chong Ming-duan remembers visiting one afternoon only to find a group of photographers hurling rocks at a couple sitting on the edge of the pier.

How to craft the perfect Instagram photo of Hong Kong

“Apparently you're not supposed to sit at the end of this pier and have long conversations with your Tinder date because then a photography club will yell at you and throw rocks at you and tell you to go to hell because you're ruining the view,” she posted sardonically on Instagram.

Over in Central, the crowds in front of Alex Croft’s mural on Graham Street are often so thick they block traffic heading up the hill into SoHo.

Commissioned by lifestyle brand G.O.D. and inspired by the hodgepodge facade of the Kowloon Walled City, the mural was completed in 2013, and it passed relatively unnoticed for several years. Then its popularity exploded when Korean actor Ji Chang-wook was photographed in front of it.

Now it attracts visitors from around the world who are eager to share photos of themselves in front of it on social media, which only perpetuates the mural’s popularity.

“They don’t really bother me,” says Eva Ho Sze-wah, who has lived in Monster Building her entire life. “But the elderly and kids may be bothered by the visitors as they can no longer play mahjong and badminton in the day time.”

Architect Kevin Mak King-huai thinks people are drawn to spaces like these precisely because they are not conventional tourist attractions. Some are visually impressive buildings that show the characteristics of dense Hong Kong urban form, he says. “Others reveal the opposite – the flexible and free side of such a highly compact and controlled city.”

To put it in perspective, in the world of social media, posing for a photo at the Avenue of Stars is tired. But a military ruin like those on Devil’s Peak, or a tightly-packed housing estate like Monster Building? Now, that’s internet gold.

“These places attract visitors as they simply represent the two very extreme conditions of Hong Kong,” says Mak. “Photographers and Instagramers these days are not looking for something official. They look for hidden gems, the nature of being adventurous.

“In many of these places there would be no official rule to stop you from climbing up high for a picture, skateboarding or even jumping into the water. The bigger freedom brings bigger photo possibilities, and more fun.”

Mak is speaking from personal experience. Just under 87,000 people follow him on Instagram as he documents the tightly packed layers of Hong Kong’s urban spaces. He also hires models to pose in a number of his photos.

In the world of social media, originality is not necessarily an asset. That’s what Italian photographer Pierfrancesco Celada found when he started visiting the Western District Public Cargo Working Area. The waterfront dockyard has long been popular as an informal recreation space for nearby residents, but it has only recently come to be known as the Instagram Pier because of its popularity with photographers.

“I just found it by chance wandering around,” he says. “I returned a few times and realised what was happening – people kept going to the pier and making similar images. It was this modern thing, this repetition of images.”

Sometimes, if the scene is not exactly as it is supposed to be, photographers will try to recreate it.

Chong was visiting the pier one day when she noticed people pouring water on the ground. “A few years ago the ground was uneven, so if it rained then water would settle into the grooves and make big puddles for those reflection puddlegrams,” she says. Then the pier was repaved, so Instagramers had to make their own puddles to get the iconic shots.

“The point seems to be that social media can be effective in raising awareness and interest of places, but to really appreciate their value people have to go see it,” says Cecilia Chu Wai-sin, an assistant professor in the University of Hong Kong’s landscape architecture division. “As more people come visit and share pictures online even more are prompted to do the same on their own terms, which I think is generally a good thing.”

But how do people who live near these Instagram hotspots feel? “What’s important to do is research,” says Hendrik Tieben, associate professor of architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “How are people affected? Are they fine with it?”

“It is really up to the original community on how they react to it,” says Mak. So far, the most lasting change in any of these hotspots seems to be in Monster Building, where local coffee shop % Arabica recently opened a branch to cater to the Instagram crowd.

“The scale of the cafe is small and it seems to work subtly,” says Mak. “The informal nature of these spaces seem to help in keeping their authenticity compared to many official tourism spots.”