...is....Harry and Meghan's official wedding portrait. The image of the couple, taken by Alexi Lubomirski, topped the likes list on the Kensington Palace Instagram account and across all royal social media channels for 2018. And the final rundown of the Windsor winners provides an interesting insight into what royalty means today.
The KP accounts are easily the most followed of all and by the close of December, it had posted 207 times on Instagram winning a total of 114 million likes. And 2.4 million of those hearts winged their way towards the monochrome image of Harry and Meghan taken after their May marriage. In fact, the top three most liked images on the account were the official wedding photos with the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex taking a lead role in five of the nine top posts on KP's Insta.
Over at the Royal Family account, there was another impressive hearts tally with the 662 posts getting over 52 million likes throughout 2018. And the most popular image posted there was the Chris Jackson portrait of the Prince of Wales with his family, taken to mark his 70th birthday and released in November. That took 683,000 likes on the Royal Family account while Harry and Meghan's wedding accounted for three of the top nine posts on this account. The other royal wedding of the year, that of Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank, also proved an Insta hit with 577,000 hearts for a portrait of them at their evening reception, taken by Alex Bramall.
Clarence House has the smallest Instagram following of the three Windsor accounts and its overall hearts total showed that. There were just shy of 4 million likes for the 344 posts Clarence House shared in 2018, with its most popular photo being the informal birthday photo also released for Charles' 70th. That Chris Jackson image got 137,000 likes while three of nine most popular images on the account in 2018 came from Harry and Meghan's wedding and a fourth from Eugenie and Jack's big day.
Overall, it shows you can't beat a wedding for a wave of popular support. Also popular on the royal accounts were images of Prince Louis, born in April 2018, who starred in some of the most liked snaps, too. As we move into 2019, we can expect Harry and Meghan's first baby to win plenty of social media likes, too, as the royal channels continue to win big followings.