For the last year the folks at Curalate, a photo/social media-centric marketing and analytic suite, have struggled with one of the great questions of the hipster generation: What is the perfect Pinterest photo?
You might be inclined to argue that garnering hundreds of likes and repins has to do with luck but you'd be wrong -- and they have the data to prove it.
See also: - Chow Bella's "Pin Up Girl" archives
The company employed a computer vision PhD and an in-house data scientist to mine 500,000 images for a dozen or so characteristics that differentiate popular Pinterest photos from the millions of images on the site.
They also identified a single photo that embodied all qualities of top-notch Pinterest-ness.
And, surprise, it's a photo of food. To be exact it's a photo from the Southern butter-lovin' chef Paula Deen of her "Aunt Peggy's Cucumber, Tomato and Onion Salad."
You can view it and the recipe on the Paula Deen website.
But what makes a photo of a pink bowl with some veggies in it so great? For one thing the research shows that photos will no faces are repinned 23 percent more often than those with them. It also has small percentage of background in the photo, which is important since having an artificial background that comprises more than 40% of the total image area can cause repins to get cropped.
The image also includes multiple colors and predominantly, red. Red or orange images are twice as successful as blue images on Pinterest. The light and color of the image also fall in the middle of the spectrum, as opposed to being black and white, super-saturated or extremely dark or light. Finally, it's portrait-style rather than landscape.
This knowledge could help businesses market themselves more successfully through the new-media platform, which is great and all. We're just trying to make sure everyone on the Internet sees how awesome out latest kitchen escapade turned out.
