How Many Photos Are There? (Statistics & Trends in 2024) (2024)

This research covers the number of photos humanity takes in a year (or day or second), how many the average person takes in a day, the total number of photos ever taken, the number of photos on Google, and much more.

All the information presented on this page is original content from Photutorial, unless indicated otherwise, and has been researched by Matic Broz. We kindly ask that you give appropriate credit to Photutorial and its authors when using our data.

Photography has existed for almost two centuries and has witnessed many great photographers. However, the true advent of photography started with the development of digital cameras and, later, smartphones—all of which made this research possible and interesting

How many photos are taken each year?

With the ever-improving quality of smartphone cameras, the number of pictures taken around the world every day is skyrocketing. In 2024, people take as many as 54,000 photos every second, equating to 1.94 trillion per year.

• People took 25% fewer photos than expected in 2020, and 20% fewer in 2021 due to lockdowns and travel restrictions.
• In 2022 the number of photos taken has returned almost back to its normal trajectory to approximately 1.72 trillion as people captured moments of regained freedom and travel.
• This upward trend is predicted to continue. In 2025, humanity will take over 2 trillion photos in one year, and 3 trillion by 2030.

Here’s a table with yearly TikTok photos taken worldwide since 2013:

In other words, there are 61,400 photos taken each second, 3.7 million each minute, 221 million per hour, 5.3 billion a day, and 161.5 billion a month.

To clarify, one million is 10⁶, one billion is 10^9, and one trillion is 10¹². Let’s put these numbers into perspective. If you took one photo per second, it would take 11 days and 14 hours to take one million photos. Likewise, it would take you 31.5 years to take 1 billion photos and 31,709 years to take a trillion photos. That was when the world’s first dog lived.

How many photos are there in the world?

The first photograph, entitled “View from the Window in Le Gras“, was taken in 1826. Then, in 1861, the first color photograph was taken, followed by Fujifilm, which introduced the first digital camera in 1988. Despite the quick development of imaging technology, photos were scarce until smartphones were equipped with digital cameras. Nowadays, billions of photos are taken every day.

Considering the relatively slow start of photography and a boom in the recent years, here’s the most recent data:

• There are about 14.3 trillion photos in the world in 2024.
• Every year, almost 2 billion new photos are taken.
• By 2030, there will be at least 30 trillion photos in the world. However, this number might get much higher depending on the growth of AI image generators.

How many images are on Google?

According to Photutorial’s data, there are an estimated 136 billion indexed images on Google Image Search in 2023. The number of indexed images could reach 382 trillion by 2030.

But Google doesn’t let us know the number of images in Google Images. The most recent confirmed data comes from 2010 when Google boasted about 10 billion indexed images. We also know that when Google Images was launched in 2001, 250 million images were indexed. This number increased to 1 billion in 2005. Since then, no official number has been confirmed.

Photos taken every day by region

An average US citizen takes 20.2 photos per day. Asia-Pacific follows the US with 15 photos per day, Latin America with 11.8 photos per day, Africa with 8.1 photos per day, and Europe with 4.9 photos per day.

Keep in mind, these numbers are higher than the global average for all people. This is because we’re looking specifically at individuals who actively take photos. Many people around the world don’t have access to cameras or choose not to take photos for various reasons.

Social media apps rarely provide information on the number of photos uploaded or shared. Therefore, the most publicly available data is several years old. So I extrapolated the numbers for 2024.

• 2013 data: 27,800 images were shared per minute on Instagram and 208,300 on Facebook. Snapchat reported 8,796 images shared per second or 527,700 per minute. WhatsApp shared 8,100 images per second or 486,100 per minute. Users on Flickr shared only about 700 images per minute.
• 2024 data: since 2013, the number of photos has tripled, and social media has gained billions of new users, so the numbers are now much higher. Today, users share 6.9 billion images on WhatsApp per day, 3.8 billion on Snapchat, 2.1 billion on Facebook, and 1.3 billion on Instagram. There are only about 1 million images shared on Flickr every day because it hasn’t grown much.

Why are these numbers higher than the reported number of photos taken each day? First, users share photos and images on social media, including screenshots and memes that aren’t counted as photos. Second, many images are shared with multiple users, but the reported numbers reflect each individual share.

Smartphones vs. Cameras

While professionals still shoot with interchangeable lens cameras (ILC), most photos are taken with smartphones. The main reasons for the widespread adoption of smartphones in photography recently are their ubiquity, price, and ease of use. As a result, 89% of photos were with smartphones in 2020, 92.5% in 2023, and 93% in 2023.

Google reports that its Android devices take 93 million selfies per day, and in one poll, 18-to-24-year-olds reported that every third photo they take is a selfie.

How many photos does the average person have?

According to Gigaom, the average user had 630 photos and 24 videos stored on their phone in 2015. Then, the average iOS user took 182 photos per month, while the average Android user took 111 photos per month. Since then, the number of photos people take every day has drastically increased and smartphones can store many more images than they used to.

According to our 2024 data, the average user has around 2,000 photos on their smartphone, with iOS users closer to 2,400 photos and Android users around 1,900 photos.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors, View from the Window at Le Gras, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, May 27, 2022.
2. Datacommons.org, 2021.
3. Mathew Brogie, Average Number of Photos Taken Per Day Around the World, Repsly, 2021.
4. Ed Lee, 2021 Worldwide Image Capture Forecast: 2020 – 2025, Rise Above Research, June 10, 2021.
5. Nina Pantic, How Many Photos Will Be Taken in 2021?, Mylio, updated February 2, 2022.
6. Minda Zetlin, Taking Selfies Destroys Your Confidence and Raises Anxiety, a Study Shows. Why Are You Still Doing It?, Inc., May 31, 2019.
7. Nate Smith, Product Manager, Google Images, Ooh! Ahh! Google Images presents a nicer way to surf the visual web, Google Official Blog, July 20, 2010.
8. Biz Carson, Special report: How we really use our camera phones, Old GigaOm, January 23, 2015.