@NatGeo: The Most Popular Instagram Photos takes its organising principle from a platform rather than from a curator’s taste. Published by National Geographic Books in October 2016, the 336-page hardcover gathers the photographs that drew the most likes and comments on the magazine’s Instagram account, setting roughly 300 images beside the remarks they provoked from viewers. Landscape, wildlife, nature and art pictures are mixed rather than sorted into tidy sections, and the book keeps the digital furniture — hashtags, throwbacks, flashbacks, the occasional animal — that shaped how these pictures were first encountered.

Credit belongs to a collective rather than a single hand. The images come from the many photographers who contributed to the account, and the authorship here is institutional and editorial: an organisation selecting its own most-viewed pictures and placing the audience’s replies next to them. On a shelf where photobooks are usually the work of one named eye, that arrangement is the point.

The result sits at a useful historical seam. A picture archive with a long print history is shown adapting to a feed — framing tuned for a small square, captions answered rather than merely read, popularity doing the work of the edit. Running the comments alongside the photographs documents not only what was photographed but how a large audience looked and answered.

For a collector, the interest is documentary rather than scarce. This is a hardcover of 336 pages, published in English, and its value lies in what it records: an established photographic institution letting its readers rank the work, and a particular moment in the circulation of photographs that has already passed. Read as a record of reception, it rewards a second look.