AppleInsider Staff
According to a year-end report from Flickr, Apple's iPhone extended its lead as photo sharing service's most-used camera brand during 2015, accounting for almost one-third of all images uploaded to the site.
Flickr's full Year in Review, published on Friday, shows iPhone's brand share grew from about 25 percent to around 30 percent over the past year, as previous No. 1 Canon declined to roughly 20 percent during the same period. Earlier this month Flickr revealed Apple's iPhone 6 and iPhone 5s to be the most popular cameras of 2015.
Overall, 23 percent of photographers used some variation of iPhone to capture Flickr photos, as seven models dating back to iPhone 4 landed in the top 10 most used camera list. Apple's iPhone 6, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5, iPhone 4s, iPhone 4 and iPhone 6 Plus made up Flickr's top 6 cameras, respectively, while iPhone 5c came in 8th just after Canon's EOS 5D Mark II.
Samsung was the only other smartphone brand to place in Flickr's top 20 list, with the Galaxy S4 and Galaxy S5 coming in at No. 11 and No. 13, respectively. Samsung's Galaxy S III placed 19th, sandwiched between two Nikon DSLRs. Together, Samsung's Galaxy handsets were used by 3.8 percent of Flickr photographers.
Taking a look at popular camera pairings reveals an interesting progression of hardware combinations reflective of iPhone's high upgrade rates. Flickr notes the top 18 pairings were iPhones and iPhones, for example an iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s. While some photographers might be dual-fisting iPhones out in the field, a more reasonable explanation is that Apple device owners simply updated their hardware sometime over the past 12 months.
The top camera pairing for 2015 was Apple's iPhone 5s and iPhone 6 with 5.4 percent of photographers. Not counting the next 17 pairings, which were iPhone and iPhone, Flickr found the most popular combinations to be some iPhone variant with a Canon DSLR.
Since arriving on the scene in 2007, iPhone has quickly become the world's leading mobile photography platform. That Flickr is seeing a boom in images shot on iPhone should come as no surprise, as Apple's yearly camera upgrades and advancements in cellular data technology — not to mention a healthy share of the global smartphone market — perfectly complement online photo sharing services.
Christine McKee
William Gallagher
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
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7 Comments
I hear Flickr has over 100 million users... but I don't know a single person who uses it. I listen to podcasts where some guests talk about using Flickr... but I don't know any actual personal friends and acquaintances who use Flickr.
I had a Flickr account in 2005... but it was kinda clunky to share photos. You'd have to paste a link into an email or AIM message. So I never used it.
Then Facebook happened. People started joining Facebook for a variety of reasons... and they also got built-in photo sharing. It made much more sense to share photos on Facebook where people were already.
Perhaps a more relevant study is the most popular cameras on Facebook.... that seems to be where people are sharing photos.
300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day.... compared to 1 million a day on Flickr.
That's amazing. I'm sure some trolls would say 2/3rd aren't using iPhone cameras.
Does this article explain what a "pairing" is or does it just start talking about pairings and expect that we know what a "pairing" is...?
After reading it a couple of times, the best I can surmise is that they looked at user accounts that have uploaded photos from more than 1 device and the 2 different devices that user used would be a pair. Is that right? (Even if it is right, I think this should have been spelled out in the article...)