Based solely on science, there are a couple of reasons why some images are more likely to be pinned than others. Last year, Curalate, a Pinterest monitoring tool for businesses monitored the millions of pins and collected data on how often they were shared, liked, or commented on. Based on their research images containing these elements were amongst the most popular on Pinterest:
Portrait Style: Images in a vertical orientation tend to perform better than images in a landscape position. Pictures with an aspect ratio between 2:3 and 4:5 are preferred; anything out of this ratio will automatically be resized by Pinterst rendering images in a less than ideal visual.
No Human Faces: While this may seem counterintuitive, it has been found that images without the presence of a human face actually receive 25% more repins than an image with a face. What’s even more, only 20% of all images on Pinterest feature a face.  One reason for this surpising fact may be that Pinterest is seen as a network of things in comparison to Facebook, which is a network of people.
Texture: Images with a smooth texture are pinned up to 17 times more than images with a rough texture.
Background: Whitespace and background surprisingly play a large rold in the popularity of images on Pinterst. Images that contain less than 10% background gets between 2 and 4 times more repins than images where the background is more.
Saturation: Images containing 50% saturation, making colors bold and vibrant, get repined 4 times as often as images with 100% saturation AND 10 times as much as black and white images.
Multiple Colors: multiple dominant colors evoke 3.25 times as many repins, comments and replies as images with just one dominant color.
Color Palette: According to Curalate, images with that contain more red-orange hues get almost twice as many repins as images containing a mostly blue palette. Images with a warm look and feel are a much more effective than those with cool and blue tones.
Light: Similar to the saturation of an image, pictures on each end of the spectrum see results. Images that are both very dark and very light get repined more often than images containing a medium lightness.
