How many photos are taken worldwide each year?

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Cifra · Accepted Answer

1,900,000,000,000 photos. People take an estimated 1.9 trillion photos a year, about 5.2 billion a day. Roughly 90% are shot on phones. More photographs are now taken every two minutes than were taken in the entire nineteenth century. Multiply phones by photos. There are several billion smartphones in use, and an average user takes a few photos a day. Billions of devices times a handful of photos times 365 gives a figure in the trillions, and the explanation confirms the daily rate at over five billion. The comparison at the end is the one that conveys the discontinuity: more photographs are now taken every two minutes than in the entire nineteenth century. Photography went from an expensive craft with a marginal cost per exposure to a free action with no marginal cost at all, and volume responded exactly as economics predicts. The consequence is that the archive problem has inverted. For most of photography's history the difficulty was capturing an image; now it is finding one among tens of thousands. Almost all of these photographs will never be looked at again, which is a genuinely new condition for a medium built on the idea of preserving moments.

Source	Photutorial photography statistics
Figure refers to	2024
Last checked	September 1, 2026
Unit	photos

How many photos are taken worldwide each year?

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