Even though Google Forms has millions of users and is one of the most popular survey tools on the planet, you can’t use Google Forms to rank images (you actually can’t use it to rank anything).

If you’re hoping to jump to a different tool, you’re also out of luck. There’s actually no option for image ranking on SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Typeform, Microsoft Forms, Jotform, Zoho Surveys, Slido, Mentimeter, or any of the other popular survey tools.

Why do none of these tools offer image ranking question-types?

As of 2022, over 56% of all surveys are now answered on mobile devices, but our small phone screens are pretty terrible for most ranking questions (especially for images). So most of the top survey tools just never bothered creating any formats for image ranking.

However, I’m not just going to drop this bad news on you and offer no solution. The best way to rank images — in a way that’s easy for respondents on any size screen — uses an approach called Pairwise Comparison.

Pairwise Comparison takes a list of options and breaks it down into a series of head-to-head pairs for participants to vote on. It then scores each opinion based on the percentage of pair votes that it won (eg. if it appeared in 20 pairs and was picked 15 times, it’s score would be 75/100).

This approach is great for respondents because it reduces cognitive load by asking people to make a series of much easier micro-decisions instead of one giant ranking task. And even better, by only needing to show two of our ranking options at a time, it’s uniquely suited to both phone respondents and image ranking!

There’s only one tool available for image-based pairwise comparison on the internet and it’s called OpinionX (made by the people who wrote this blog post — hello!).

The free tier of OpinionX includes image ranking alongside a bunch of other ranking types. There’s no limit to the number of images you can rank or the amount of surveys you can create, there’s no time limit on your free tier, and you don’t need to put your credit card in to use it. Check out this breakdown of the OpinionX pricing plans, if you don’t believe me.

You can create your first image ranking survey right now in less than 5 minutes OpinionX.