While doing due diligence deciphering discourse on another digital domain, a passing reference to a statistic diverted me to this site. What I found there is a ton of "data" that has me scratching my head.
For instance, the average number of photos taken a day worldwide is 20, but the average number taken by a smartphone user in the US is 20.2 ;~). Are we to believe that Europe—who according to those same statistics takes only 4.9 smartphone photos a day—is using dedicated cameras more than their phones? When I see data presented as "scientific and mathematical"—the site's words, not mine—and the data does not seem to be internally consistent, it makes me immediately doubt the data.
Another statistic: 12.4 trillion photos have been taken throughout history, but about 3 trillion of those were taken in 2021 and 2022. Under any scenario I can consider, that would say that we're in a hugely exponential increase in photography at the moment. I mean a hockey stick graph that's almost perfectly upright. But if I look further down the page, I find that the number of photos taken from 2013 to 2023 is about 12 trillion, so which is it: history, or the last decade? Or are we to believe that only ~.3t images were taken prior to 2013? (If you look at the numbers and the graph, any graph point for 2012 added to the chart would either invalidate the overall number, or force a claim that "photography exploded in 2012 and 2013" ;~).
I also wonder about the strange rounding: 92.5% taken with smartphones, 7% with cameras, leaving me to wonder about what took the remaining 15 billion images in 2021 and 2022. Then there's the poor wording: "According to our latest estimates [sic], another 1.72 trillion photos are taken every year, so the total number increases by 10-14% every year." Quisquiliarum quisquiliarum ex.
Do I need to go further? The article quotes "sources" in footnotes. Okay, but then how do we reconcile the article's claim of 1.2t images in 2021 with the 1.12t number found in one of the sources?
The answer is we don't. My statistics professor in my doctorate program almost certainly wouldn't accept any of the assertions in that article on face value. (Since they ask for a credit, here it is: Photutorial and Matic Bros. ;~)
The problem I have is that, with a bit of further searching, I'm finding the above statistics quoted all over the place, sometimes by sites that should know better.
No doubt tons of images are created every day. No doubt that there are researchers everywhere trying to make sense of that. But junk statistics are not what should be driving anyone's conclusions and decisions.
