How to Take a Good Selfie?

Abstract

Selfies are now a global phenomenon. This massive number of self-portrait images taken and shared on social media is revolutionizing the way people introduce themselves and the circle of their friends to the world. While taking photos of oneself can be seen simply as recording personal memories, the urge to share them with other people adds an exclusive sensation to the selfies. Due to the Big Data nature of selfies, it is nearly impossible to analyze them manually. In this paper, we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first selfie dataset for research purposes with more than 46,000 images. We address interesting questions about selfies, including how appearance of certain objects, concepts and attributes influences the popularity of selfies. We also study the correlation between popularity and sentiment in selfie images. In a nutshell, from a large scale dataset, we automatically infer what makes a selfie a good selfie. We believe that this research creates new opportunities for social, psychological and behavioral scientists to study selfies from a large scale point of view, a perspective that best fits the nature of the selfie phenomenon.