iPhone one of the most popular cameras on Flickr
Everywhere you look these days, you see an iPhone, a story about an iPhone, or something related to an iPhone. However, it never dawned upon most of us that the the iPhone would become one of the most popular cameras on Flickr, though now it has.
Flickr, the wildly popular Yahoo!-owned photo-sharing and photo-blogging Web site, keeps track of the cameras used to capture the images that their users choose to display on their site. The Flickr function that tracks camera usage is called the Flickr Camera Finder, and it shows that the iPhone has become not only the most popular cell phone camera, but also one of the most popular of all cameras used to take the photos that you see on Flickr! The real surge in popularity started with the release of the 3G iPhone.
There are a lot of very serious photographers on Flickr. It should come as no surprise, then, that the most popular cameras on the site, historically, have been Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras, the choice for serious photographers. During the last 12 months, the iPhone has caught the Canon Rebel XT and Nikon D80. The Apple cell phone is now second only to the wildly popular new-ish Canon Rebel Xti.
We should note that the Flickr Camera Finder statistics are a little odd, according to a CNET news article. The numbers are the product of a years worth of daily rushes; there is a new winner ever day based upon the numbers uploaded that day. Thus, cameras that are used for uploads every day fare better than those whose owners choose to wait and upload a batch of photos at the end of the month. This may tilt the table towards the iPhone. So does the fact that most cell phones do not identify their cameras during upload. In terms of total photos on the Flickr site, the Rebel Xti holds almost a ten to one lead over the iPhone.
Still, the Flickr Camera Finder statistics are a great indicator of how may people are using their iPhone cameras for photos that they want to keep and share. It is also a testament to the ease of use and relative quality of the iPhone camera, especially in social situations. It is a lot easier to take pictures of your friends at a party with your iPhone than it is to get out the old SLR for the same task. We suspect, however, that the really serious photographers will continue to take the best photos on Flickr with higher quality cameras.
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