Before revision:  We present a new strong baseline for popularity prediction on Instagram, which is both robust and efficient to compute. The approach expands previous work by a comprehensive ablation study of the predictive power of multiple representations of the visual modality and by detailed use of explainability tools .
After revision:  We present a robust, efficient, and explainable baseline for population-based popularity prediction, achieving strong ranking performance. We employ the latest methods in computer vision to maximize the information extracted from the visual modality .