Officials in popular tourist destinations from Spain to Malaysia are starting to push back, and are considering tough new measures to control the most destructive behavior. These include imposing fines and jail sentences on unruly visitors, limiting group tourism and even turning the tables on the miscreants by posting photographs of their antics in a bid to publicly shame them.

But the appeal of selfie sticks and picture-taking drones is strong.

“It used to be fine to take a picture of the Eiffel Tower or Mount Everest, but that’s not good enough anymore,” said Jesse Fox, an assistant communications professor at Ohio State University who has studied the impulsive behavior of selfie-takers posting images on social networks. “Now tourists have to put themselves in the picture. It’s about ‘me,’ not about the place that I visit.”

That narcissism, she said, “results in these extreme, stupid behaviors.”

In recent months, there have been plenty of examples.

In March, two California women were arrested in Rome on charges of vandalism after they scratched initials into a wall of the Colosseum and snapped a photograph. In May, two tourists in Cremona, Italy, who had climbed an 18th-century marble sculpture of Hercules to take a photograph of themselves, ended up causing a crown on it to smash to pieces.

In June, three South Korean tourists in Milan crashed a drone into the city’s cathedral while taking aerial photographs.