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Japan’s free stock image site of muscular men doing whimsical and mundane things reveals rankings

Krista Rogers a few minute ago
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The site with a goal of “Adding muscles to everyday life” has released a new gallery collecting its most viral muscly moments up to the present.

Fukuoka-based Smile Academy’s Muscle Plus free stock image site has been around for a while now and it hasn’t stopped causing a stir. We can only thank the muscular geniuses who decided to gift the world with free-to-use, professional-quality shots of themselves posing in situations that make you think, “Heck, I can’t use that for anything!” before immediately downloading it anyway. Their purpose is not only making viewers’ smile muscles move but also promoting local people, cultural artifacts, events, and places in rural Fukuoka Prefecture in an effort to revitalize the area. Much of their work is seasonally appropriate as well, as seen in the epic Halloween photo story collection a few years back.

▼ Logo for the Muscle Plus free stock image site

Thanks to the positive public response, Muscle Plus has just released a new page that collects the photos and some quantitative data behind its most trending photos on Twitter. Thanks to this new system, you can simply check out which photos are getting the most hits when you’re in need of an image with impact. Below, we’ve compiled five of the top trending photos along with the date when they were uploaded to Twitter and their cumulative likes and views. All numbers are accurate as of October 21, 2026, so many have likely gained more hits since then.

1. Uploaded to Twitter on September 26, 2026
123,553 likes / 9,337,570 views

There’s nothing quite as refreshing as two buff dudes frolicking in a field of vibrantly pink cosmos in Nokonoshima Park. This would be a peak tourism campaign if we ever saw one.

2. Uploaded October 1, 2026
52,535 likes / 2,170,577 views

Two guys demonstrate how to harvest tea leaves at Yame Central Tea Plantation. It’s not a technique that we’ve ever seen before, but they seem to know what they’re doing.

3. Uploaded July 18, 2025
94,684 likes / 3,594,236 views

This quintessential summertime shot in the sunflower field at Fukufuku no Sato farmers’ market reminds us that it’s OK to stop and sniff the flowers–sans shirts–sometimes.

4. Uploaded September 29, 2024
109,505 likes / 6,548,394 views

Have you ever been sitting there eating some delicious yakiimo on a crisp autumn day with your weightlifting buddies when a cat suddenly decides to crash the photoshoot? No, it’s never happened to us, but we’re very thankful it happened to them.

5. Uploaded December 25, 2022
14,419 likes / 846,854 views

We just hate it when we’re baking in the kitchen at Patisserie Serenite and someone comes along and sneakily adds liquid protein to the freshly whipped cream we were making. Thank goodness there’s a stock image to capture that situation.

The dudes at Muscle Plus have almost gotten us excited enough to start our own library of free stock images–though in our case, there would be much less of the buff and more of the puff.

Source, images: PR Times
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