Photo by Jesse Menn

On average your friends share 200,000 Facebook photos with you and my job at Jetpac is to turn them into beautiful slideshows. To do that I've had users manually rate over a million friends' pictures so I can train algorithms to automatically identify the good ones. What I found interesting is that the worst photos are obviously aimed at a narrow audience, like your family or colleagues:

#1 – Mommy – 3.26%

#2 – Graduation – 3.85%

#3 – Daddy – 4.33%

#4 – Reunion – 5.36%

#5 – CEO – 6.03%

#6 – Social – 6.08%

#7 – Grandpa – 7.61%

#8 – Cousins – 7.72%

#9 – Hyatt – 8.65%

#10 – Niece – 9.30%

The percentage is how many photos with those words in the caption were rated as 'good' by our testers

The real lesson here isn't that we shouldn't take pictures of our kids, it's that we need a better way to target our pictures to the people who care about them. Our co-workers are the audience for the CEO getting blitzed at the Hyatt bar but it's hard to share with only them. Facebook's working on lists and finer-grained access controls, and Google's built the whole of Plus around circles, but none of them are very easy to use. Until we have something better, our social streams will be full of pictures we don't want to see.