Abstract: The experience of landscape perception is an important factor influencing hikers’ choices of trails during hiking. Understanding the preferences of landscape perception of hikers is a key to promote sustainable use of the trail resources when planning a new trail. However, the popular expert-based approach is criticized in the validity of studying preferences of landscape perception of hikers for the shortcoming of homogenization, which has ignored the opinions of actual users. This paper focuses on the National Trails System Ninghai (NTS Ninghai) of Zhejiang Province, the earliest NTS trail in China. First, the volunteered geographic information (VGI) of NTS Ninghai was collected via data crawling technology, including the coordinates of the line spots and photos shared by the hikers. Then Theisen polygon was introduced to extract and analyze the hot spots from distribution of all the photos in the trails. A total of 24 hot scenic spots were selected as typical landscapes in NTS Ninghai. Based on the selected photos of the hot spots, NVivo qualitative analysis software was applied to elicit the free nodes and inductive tree nodes, and consequently identified the landscape elements that were most impressive for the hikers. Finally, the perceptually exciting nodes (PEN) were identified from photos along the corresponding trails and trajectories. Using PEN can derive the specific landscape resources that cause hikers’ landscape preferences, and support optimization and improvement of landscape resources of the trails.