Predicting Personality Traits with Instagram Pictures

Instagram is a popular social networking application, which allows photo-sharing and applying different photo filters to adjust the appearance of a picture. By applying photo filters, users are able to create a style that they want to express to their audience. In this study we tried to infer personality traits from the way users take pictures and apply filters to them. To investigate this relationship, we conducted an online survey where we asked participants to fill in a personality questionnaire, and grant us access to their Instagram account through the Instagram API. Among 113 participants and 22,398 extracted Instagram pictures, we found distinct picture features (e.g., hue, brightness, saturation) that are related to personality traits. Our findings suggest a relationship between personality traits and the way users want to make their pictures look. This allow for new ways to extract personality traits from social media trails, and new ways to facilitate personalized systems.