Since the onset of social networks and camera-equipped smartphones nearly a decade ago, digital images are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life. However, both theorists and practitioners mostly neglect the meaning of photographic images, the research questions arising from this digital explosion, and how the current era of social media has marked related research lines.

This book focuses on images in social media and offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the research from a digital library and information science point of view. In particular, since the onset of social media, well-known methodologies are used to locate relevant documents and collect the available literature. The literature is further categorized into domains, indexing, and retrieval; this is used to analyze the various changes undertaken to cope with the peculiarities of social media images. Further, the authors also review the field of eye tracking research and its relation to image tagging.

Overall, the book offers an introduction to the iconic language of images in social media by reporting and discussing the opinions of several actors and researchers from library and cultural studies, journalism, and related fields. Furthermore, it provides a systematic overview of the state of the art on photographic research since the onset of social networks in 2005.

Given the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of the topic and the way it is approached, the book may be primarily useful to undergraduate students in library and information science and social psychology. Computer science students working on image indexing and retrieval would likely find little information of immediate value to their studies.