Washington: The images people share on social media- of themselves at bars, sporting events and weddings- could be valuable to marketers assessing their customers' attitudes toward a brand, a new study has found.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have taken a first step toward this capability in study where they analyzed five million such images.

Researchers Eric Xing and Gunhee Kim looked at images associated with 48 brands in four categories -- sports, luxury, beer and fast food.

The images were obtained through popular photo sharing sites such as Pinterest and Flickr.

Their automated process unsurprisingly produced clusters of photos that are typical of certain brands.

But some of the highly ranked associations underscored the type of information particularly associated with images and especially with images from social media sites.

Kim noted, are events where people tend to take and share lots of photos, each of which is an opportunity to show brands in the context in which they are used and experienced.

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