I was going through G20 summit news and saw their traditional 'family photo' session. I got curious about how the photo order is decided. Initially I thought host country will decide order in which all leader pose for the photo. Then I looked at some old summit photos and one thing that immediately caught my eye was that leaders from US, China and Russia were always in front row (at least from 2014 to 2019. I have collected all images here ). However, I could not find any pattern for the other leaders (at least for the few leaders whom I know and have searched). Another obvious pattern was that the host leader was in the front row.
Does anyone know something about this photo session? As this is a very big meeting, I am pretty sure order has to be decided early than on the spot.
Note: I do not own any image. I have collected them from a simple internet search