Yesterday morning I posted 20+ photos that detail the recent birth of my daughter, Caroline. The photos were posted as a Flickr set, and the set’s thumbnail gallery URL was sent to a wide range of family and friends, perhaps nearly 100 email addresses.

I tried hard to take some quality shots, get good lighting, set up some interesting angles, etc. With Flickr’s “Views” stats per photo, I found the resulting view counts of each photo in that set very revealing about what people find the most interesting. Although highly subjective & interpretive, here’s what I perceive:

• People like family photos. By far, the two most viewed photos (nearly double the views of any other photo in the set) were of (a) me, my wife, and our newborn posing and (b) me, my wife, our newborn, and our 3 yr old son. Ok, ok, so those were two of four photos in the set that I didn’t take (unless you believe I photoshoped myself in), and didn’t have nearly the good flash, lighting, and details of the other shots. One of the next most popular shots included all the girls: my wife, her sister, her mom, and our newborn, taken blurry by an iphone. People love the family shots, no matter the quality!
• People like closely cropped baby shots. Of the six photos in a series simply of the baby in her cart, the most oft viewed was the closest zoomed photo of our newborn. The second most viewed is arguably the second most zoomed. The two least viewed? Nearly equivalent shots, only further away from the baby.
• Initimacy is valued. Other than the family shots, two of the most viewed were shots of my wife holding our newborn on her chest and nuzzling or kissing or staring at each other.
• People stay away from newborn photos from immediately after birth (like, in the first five minutes). Two tasteful closeups after our newborn was cleaned up - even one interestingly positioned on the scale and revealing the baby’s weight - were two of the least viewed.