Shortlisted images in the running to be crowned Photobox Instagram photograph of the year range from furry friends to the Holi festival to the meaning of love. Judges, including the Guardian’s former picture editor Eamonn McCabe, have whittled down 180,000 submissions to unearth a shortlist that celebrates the best of social media. Winners will be announced October 3, 2018. Here: Najac, France. Travel shortlist. (Photo by Aaron Jenkin/@aaronjenkin)

American actress and model Megan Fox looks lush in a green bikini for a forest photoshoot which sent social media wild in the second decade of July 2023. (Photo by Cibelle Levi)

241543903 (a.k.a “Heads in Freezers”) is a numerical keyword associated with a photo meme that involves people taking pictures with their heads in the freezer & sharing them online. By tagging a series of image files with a cryptic number, a high level of search engine optimization can be easily achieved. As a result, typing “241543903” into image search engines like Google Images successfully yields pages after pages of pictures showing people’s heads in freezers.
In 2009, David Horvitz started the “Heads in Freezers” meme. Participants took photos of their heads in freezers, tagged them with “241543903” and uploaded them to social media sites like Tumblr.

Iraqi security forces vehicles take part in a military parade in the streets of Baghdad, Iraq July 12, 2016. Social media activists posted images of tanks, armored vehicles, cannons, soldiers, police officers, and PMF members in Saadoun Street. The photos spiked a rumor of military coup. Military and security advisor and expert Lt. Diyaa al-Wakil said that it is only normal for such rumors to spread since there were no prior announcements about the training. (Photo by Khalid al Mousily/Reuters)

Anamal photographer Ren Netherland travels thousands of miles across America to creative dog grooming competitions every year. He captures the dogs with their striking designs – which include characters from Disney, Star Wars and Sesame Street.

Photo: A dog with a half tiger and half elephant design at a creative grooming competition in Hershey, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Ren Netherland/Barcroft Media). P.S. To see the first part, use please the “Creative dog grooming” tag.

Girls dressed in “Hanfu”, or Han clothing, prepare for an event to mark the traditional Qixi festival, the Chinese equivalent of Valentine's Day, at a park in Beijing, China, August 7, 2019. Chinese for “Han clothing”, “Hanfu” is based on the idea of donning costumes worn in bygone eras by China's dominant Han ethnicity. Some of the most popular styles are from the Ming, Song and Tang dynasties. Hanfu enthusiasts doubled to two million in 2018 from a year earlier, according to a survey by Hanfu Zixun, a popular community account on the Wechat social media platform. (Photo by Jason Lee/Reuters)

On Earth Day this year, NASA asked people all around the world a question: “Where are you on Earth Right Now?” To answer this question people were asked to post their selfie on social media. The goal was to use each picture as a pixel in the creation of a “Global Selfie” – a mosaic image that would look like Earth appeared from the space. The 3.2 gigapixel “Global Selfie”, was made the with 36,422 individual images.

Palestinian plain-clothed security officers detain a man during a demonstration in the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, on June 26, 2021, to protest the death of human rights activist Nizar Banat while in the custody of Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces. Thousands of mourners attended on June 25 the funeral of the 43-year-old Banat, a day after he died in custody following his violent arrest by Palestinian security forces, which sparked outrage in the occupied West Bank. He was known for social media videos denouncing alleged corruption within the PA. (Photo by Ahmad Gharabli/AFP Photo)