Abstract: Tourism has entered an era of attention economy, scientific management of the scarce attention resources of the public plays an important role in promoting the optimization of tourist destination image and enhancing the competitive advantage of tourism industry. From the perspective of attention economy, this paper makes a comprehensive analysis of the connotation of attention economy and optimization factors of tourist destination image, and puts forward some attention strategies to optimize tourist destination image. Taking Lijiang ancient city as an example, it further clarifies the image optimization strategy to solve specific problems. The results show that attention economy is suitable for the optimization of tourist destination image, but special attention should be paid to the influence of the change of tourist destination core attraction on the flow of attention, because attention economy, as a new perspective, plays a role as a booster in the image optimization of tourist destinations. According to the psychological characteristics of tourists and object stimulus property, human-human perception, human-earth perception law and attention synthesis technology should be used to optimize tourists' psychological perception of tourist destination and boost the optimization of tourist destination image. This study provides a new perspective by combining the knowledge of tourism, psychology and other disciplines and thus has an important value in tourism destination image optimization.