Are High-Quality Photos More Popular Than Low-Quality Ones? A Quantitative Study

Social media popularity has increased over the years. Millions of images are uploaded and shared on social media daily. Image popularity prediction is extensively studied over past years. Several research works have shown that image content and social context play an important role in predicting image popularity. However, the impact of image aesthetics and quality on popularity has not been studied in detail until now. In this paper, we report a detailed study and analysis for finding the correlation between image quality/aesthetics and image popularity. To solidify the understanding of the impact, we present experimental results that are conducted on SMP 2020 and ICIP image popularity 2020 datasets to investigate if a high quality image or an aesthetically pleasing image is likely to be popular. We found that image aesthetics is moderately correlated with image popularity while quality is less so