The Rise of Mobile Photos — And the Social Networks that Share Them

What with all the talking about photo apps we’ve been doing both on our blog and in our office, this infographic from HighTable on the rise of mobile photography made me sit up and take a little more notice. The nice design doesn’t hurt, either.

Some interesting points from the infographic:

• Analog photography accounted for 100% of pictures taken in 1990, but over the past 21 years that percentage has plummeted to just 1%.
• Of the digital photos taken today, the percentage coming from mobile phones is on the rise as the percentage coming from point-and-shoot cameras continues to fall.
• For a network of 7 billion people, Facebook stores 140 billion photos. Over 3,500 photos are uploaded to Facebook every second — more than beating out Photobucket, Picasa, and other online libraries.

All this has made me ponder the serious impact social media networks have had on the way we live our lives. I mean, think about it — if it weren’t for the urge to share photos of your epic vacation or little Timmy’s first turn at bat, we wouldn’t be taking nearly the volume of pictures that we do. And we have that urge to share because sharing gets you likes and comments. Sharing gets us attention. So we keep on taking pictures, and we keep on pushing them out to our social networks, because we want that response. We seek that approval.

No wonder camera phones are poised to take over the majority of our photography!

Take a look for yourself: