Mahakumbh Mela 2025 (Prayagraj) Field Photographs of Banners, Hoardings and Public Messaging
Description
This dataset contains 102 original field photographs of banners, hoardings, signboards and exhibition displays at the Maha Kumbh Mela 2025, Prayagraj, India, one of the largest religious gatherings in the world. The images were taken by the authors on a smartphone camera (Xiaomi Redmi Note 8) on 16 days between 4 January and 18 February 2025, covering the pre-event set-up phase and the main Mela period (13 January – 26 February 2025). The photographs document the visual communication environment of the gathering: religious and sect messaging, government and political hoardings, public-health and safety notices, environmental (Ganga) campaigns, corporate and brand advertising, charity and donation appeals with QR/UPI codes, exhibition panels and cultural programme boards. Most text is in Hindi, with some English and Sanskrit. Scenes include camp gates and banner walls, roadsides, open Mela grounds, public facilities, stages and indoor exhibition pavilions. Each image has a stable identifier (KUMBH_0001.jpg to KUMBH_0102.jpg) in order of capture. An accompanying catalogue (XLSX and CSV) gives one row per image: event, date, time and location, photographer and rights, scene category, visible features, a crowd annotation (none / sparse / moderate / dense), technical details, processing applied and sharing status. Original EXIF metadata (camera, date/time and, for 26 images, GPS) is retained. To protect privacy, the faces of real people were blurred in 35 images; faces printed on banners were left unchanged because they form part of the documented content. No other edits were made. Only the authors' own photographs are included. The data can support research on religious and political communication, advertising, public-health and risk communication at mass gatherings, environmental messaging, visual culture and Devanagari signage.
Files
Steps to reproduce
1. Fieldwork: the authors walked through camp areas, roads, exhibition pavilions and public facilities of the Maha Kumbh Mela area, Prayagraj, on 16 days (4 Jan – 18 Feb 2025), and photographed banners, hoardings, signboards and displays with a Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 smartphone (rear camera, default settings). 2. Selection: only the authors' own camera files were retained. Images downloaded from the internet or social media, and one photograph taken after the event, were excluded. 3. Identifiers: files were renamed KUMBH_NNNN.jpg in chronological order of the EXIF DateTimeOriginal timestamp. The original filenames are listed in the catalogue. 4. Privacy: faces of real people were blurred (pixelation plus Gaussian blur over manually placed regions) in 35 images. These files were rotated upright and re-saved at JPEG quality 95. All other files are unchanged. No cropping or resizing was done. 5. Cataloguing: each image was described using the fields defined in the "Definitions & Method" sheet of the catalogue. Crowd annotation is a manual visual count of the people visible in the frame (None 0; Sparse 1–5; Moderate 6–20; Dense >20). Image quality was rated from a sharpness score (variance of the Laplacian on a 1200-px greyscale copy). Location comes from EXIF GPS where present, or from sector names printed on signs. 6. Verification: catalogue entries were checked against the images by the authors.
Institutions
- National Forensic Sciences UniversityGujarat, Gandhinagar
- University of AllahabadUttar Pradesh, Prayagraj