How many photos do you take in a year?
The number of photos we take everyday has exploded in the last few years. Before reading any further, ask yourself how many photos do you think the world takes in a day? Guestimate (without looking at your phone!) how many you take in a week or on vacation?
I took a non-scientific Facebook poll yesterday asking how many photos my friends have on their camera roll. The numbers ranged from 6,314 to 66,669. That is a lot of photos!
Because I like numbers…
350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day. That’s 14.58 million per hour, 243,000 per minute, and 4,000 per second.
More than 95 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day. That’s 3.96 million per hour, 65,972 per minute, and 1,100 per second.
In the United States, the average person takes 20.2 photos per day. For my European friends, the average is much lower at 4.9 per day (Europeans were in last place). These are pre-Covid numbers, but you get the point.
Mylio, a photo organizing and management application, estimated that 1.4 trillion photos would be taken in 2020 and that number is expected to rise to 1.56 trillion in 2022. And the number of photos stored on our phones, computers, and other places is expected to grow to 9.3 trillion by 2022. These are staggering numbers.
Graphic from Mylio, a photo storage application.
The emergence of mobile phones with better and better phone cameras accounts for much of this explosion. Gone are the days when you need to be judicious with your camera because you had to purchase film and pay for developing. Most people did not have their camera on them all day every day. Now you can just pull your phone out of your pocket and snap a shot. I’m guessing there aren’t a whole lot of physical photos of coffee cups, and yet social media is filled with them today. Why? Well I don’t drink coffee so I don’t have any of these photos, but it is a facet of everyday life that many people revere and want to document. And why not? Taking a photo is quick, cheap, and easy to share to connect with others. It’s also a great way to create a reference for later (how many of you have taken a photo of a parking spot?)
All of my photos are accessible on my phone but do not take up space.
How do you stack up with these numbers? Take a look at your camera roll and see how many photos you took last week. Take a look at the photos you took at your last gathering, special event, or vacation. Take a look at how many photos you took in 2020. Or 2019. Feel free to comment below with your numbers. Note that there is a big difference between the number of photos on your camera roll and the number of photos accessible on your phone. I have a few thousand on my camera roll, but I have over 100,000 accessible on my phone and not taking up space.
Where do all of these photos go? Where do your photos go? For many people, they live solely on their phone. Or they are socked away in the nether regions of their computer, with a big chunk on their phones. Perhaps once a year or every few years, when their phones are running out of storage or it’s time to get a new phone, they purge a bunch. And then 6 months later they find themselves looking for that one photo only to realize it was lost in the purge. Or they accidentally delete photos from their iCloud account (if you delete from your iPhone, it deletes everywhere). Don’t be that person. Make a plan to back up your photos today.
If you want to back up your camera roll photos to keep them safe, even if you don’t have time to organize all of your photos, subscribe to my newsletter (click the link and scroll to the bottom) for some tips.