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How did smartphones and picture-sharing apps change the number of photographs people take and share?

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Alfred Stieglitz: Child with Striped Dress (Younger Raab Child) — History of photography *Child with Striped Dress (Younger Raab Child)*, autochrome photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 1907; in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The introduction of smartphones and picture-sharing applications has led to a profound proliferation in the number of photographs taken and shared globally. Beginning with the release of the first iPhone in 2007, the ubiquity of mobile devices combined with platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has made capturing and uploading images to the Internet nearly instantaneous.1

This shift has transformed photography from a process that was once relatively slow and cumbersome into an effortless activity. Users now frequently document mundane events, everyday places, and personal experiences, resulting in an almost unfathomable archive of digital images. By enabling individuals to flood the feeds of followers with a seemingly infinite number of shots, these technologies have fundamentally created an image-saturated world. This development has effectively turned photography into a virtual map of human habitation and a central component of modern digital communication.21