A survey by the photography sharing website PhotoBucket has revealed some interesting trends about where its images are coming from.
The company, which currently has around 100 million users with 9.5 billion photos and videos, conducts a survey every year to take a closer look at photographic trends. It also uses technical and EXIF data to compile the stats.
Unsurprisingly, the trends show that mobile phones are being increasingly used to take, edit and share photos, with mobile app usage shown to have increased by 64%, more than doubling since Summer 2011.
Switch
Digital camera use has apparently shrunk from 82% down to 64% in the space of a year, but interestingly, the survey found that 38% of respondents switched between digital cameras and mobile devices during the 2011 holiday period, perhaps suggesting that cameras are still favoured over mobiles for more "important" images.
Other survey results showed that while there has been a growth in the photo-sharing market, fewer people are sharing across multiple sites, instead preferring to consolidate images on one service.
This year, 80% of the poll respondents shared photos online via social media sites, up from 57% at the same time last year.
Photobucket internal data revealed that, somewhat unusually, 75% of the photos taken on mobile devices were from Android OS smartphones, while just 25% came from an Apple device. It is especially odd when considering that Flickr data shows that the iPhone 4 is its most popular image capture device, beating all cameras, let alone other mobile phones.
