A method to assess aesthetic quality of photographs, including classifying photographs into categories; generating computational models of image aesthetics, each computational model of image aesthetics associated to one different category of the categories; extracting a plurality of features from a photograph, the plurality of features being simplicity features, global features computed in the whole image and/or low-level features in contrasting regions of an image of said photograph. The contrasting regions are partitions of the image obtained by applying an image segmentation algorithm based on feature contrast to the photograph. The method also including applying a computational model of image aesthetics to at least part of the plurality of features extracted from said photograph, the computational model applied according to the category of the photograph, in order to assess aesthetic quality of the photograph.