A review of the studies on social media images from the perspective of information interaction

[Purpose/meaning] As the development of social media and the rise of visual culture, image in the social media has received more and more attention from scholars and sorting out its content is beneficial to clarifying the related research of images in social media and provide a new research perspective. [Method/procedure] This article takes the image literature in social media as the research object, carries on the keyword analysis to the literature and summarizes the typical research methods. Then this paper adopts analytic induction method to summarize the research progress of images in social media in recent ten years from the perspective of “publisher-information-receiver” in information interaction. [Results/conclusions] Through the analysis of research topics, it is found that the feature of images on social media and user's information interaction behavior based on image are the key content that researchers pay attention to. Studies on images in social media can be divided into three parts:the characteristics of images in social media, image publishing behavior in social media, and image perception and acquisition behavior of social media users.[Innovation/value]This paper constructs a systematic cognitive frame for image research in social media, summarizes the existing research results, and predicts the future research from three aspects: the impact of image-based information interaction on users' social relationships in social media environments, the problem of user privacy disclosure in image social communication and the advancement of computer vision technique in image research in social media environment.