What Instagram Can Teach Us About Bird Photography: The Most Photogenic Bird and Color Preferences

What makes a great bird photo? To examine this question, we collected over 20,000 photos of birds from the photo-sharing platform Instagram with their corresponding liking data. We standardized the total numbers of Likes and extracted information from the image captions. With this database, we investigated content-related image properties to see how they affect the ubiquitous online behavior of pressing a Like button. We found substantial differences between bird families, with a surprising winner in the category “most instagrammable bird.” The colors of the depicted bird also significantly affected the liking behavior of the online community, replicating and generalizing previously found human color preferences to the realm of bird photography.