The iPhone 4 has an excellent camera; I’ve been using it as my primary point-and-shoot for a year now. It looks like I’m not alone either as the iPhone 4 has just taken the top slot for cameras on Flickr. More people now shoot pictures with an iPhone 4 than the top DSLR’s from Canon or Nikon.
The new list of top cameras on Flickr is as follows:
- iPhone 4
- Nikon D90
- Canon EOS 5D Mark II
- Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi
- Canon EOS REBEL T1i
As a pro photographer I actually own several of the cameras on the top 10 list and I love them as incredible photography-enabling tools. But the fact of the matter is that most people are creatures of opportunity. When you’re in the moment and you want to take a picture, you’re going to grab whatever camera you have handy.
But I think that the popularity of the iPhone 4 when it comes to Flickr has a lot to do with the fact that just taking pictures isn’t enough for people any more. Most people want to share any photos they shoot immediately with friends, family or the public.
As an interesting comparison, you can see that the iPhone 3G has taken a severe nosedive over the last year. The large dip seems to correlate with a spike in popularity for the iPhone 4. Because Flickr doesn’t have exact dates on its charts, it is hard to say exactly when this happened but it seems likely that it was at Christmas, when many people likely received iPhone 4’s as gifts and set aside their aging iPhone 3G’s.
The array of tools available that enable people to get images onto Flickr from the iPhone is decent, but I’ll be honest, most Flickr upload tools could be better. Flickr has also shown a distinct lack of aggression when it comes to owning the online photo sharing space. This is an arena where they are uniquely poised to rule the roost, yet they’re content with just plugging along.
These stats are interesting, but if you compared them to statistics for Facebook, for instance, you would likely find that the iPhone 4 took the top spot there long ago.
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