Now you can predict the popularity of your photos. MIT PhD candidate Aditya Khosla has launched a new online tool called “What makes an image popular?” based on his research paper with Atish Das Sarma and Raffay Hamid.
“Using a dataset of about 2.3 million images from Flickr, we demonstrate that we can reliably predict the normalized view count of images with a rank correlation of 0.81 using both image content and social cues.”
— Aditya Khosla, Atish Das Sarma and Raffay Hamid
So what does make a photo popular? Guess what ... a bikini. Or, if you want to diversify, a miniskirt, swimsuit, or bra. Sounds like a tough PhD research project there!
Photos were analyzed for several criteria: colors, content and social. Here are some insights from the paper:
Colors:
We observe that on average, the greenish and bluish colors tend to have lower importance as compared to more reddish colors.
Content:
- Strong positive impact: miniskirt, maillot, bikini, cup, brassiere, perfume, revolver
- Medium positive impact: cheetah, giant panda, basketball, llama, plow, ladybug
- Low positive impact: wild boar, solar dish, horse cart, guacamole, catamaran
- Negative impact: spatula, plunger, laptop, golf cart, space heater
Social:
- Mean Views: mean of number of normalized views of all public images of the given user
- Photo count: number of public images uploaded by the given user
- Contacts: number of contacts of the given user
- Groups: number of groups the given user belongs to
- Group members: average number of members in the groups a given user belongs to
- Member duration: the amount of time since the given user joined Flickr
- Is pro: whether the given user has a Pro Flickr account or not
So stop photographing spatulas and look for some bikinis.
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Sources: PopPhoto. Image credit: Aditya Khosla.
