For this project, I thought about profile photos on Facebook and how my friends and followers choose to represent themselves. Because people often compare the number of “likes” on content and often times use this number as a measure of popularity, I wanted to the focus of my project to be on likes.

Before I began studying these photos, I hypothesized that profile photos that were edited and photographed by another person would be more probable to get more likes. Additionally, I had a feeling that women’s profile photos would also have more likes than men’s.

On Saturday afternoon, I began compiling images. I started by creating a blank Photoshop document, then scrolled down my newsfeed to find profile photos. When someone liked, commented on, tagged or shared content, including photos, articles, or brands, I pulled the profile photo and pasted it into the Photoshop doc. 

Because Facebook posts often include multiple people, I streamlined the process of collecting photos by limiting my exploration to the first person mentioned in the post. This also helped to expand the range of Facebook profiles. 

 For example, when this post appeared on my newsfeed advertising a company, I went to Andrew's profile and pasted his profile photo to my document.