We Are Taking More Photos Than Ever Before But Are We Keeping Them Safe?

We now take more photos every 2-minutes than we did during the entire 19th century - just let the size of that figure sink in...

The world seems to be photography-crazy, which obviously we think is a great thing, but what are we actually doing with the trillions of photos we now capture? It's easy to see that a lot end up on social media channels but is anyone printing images any more or are they just getting forgotten about on computers and smartphones? These are the questions an interesting infographic, put together by Mark Lord Photography, are asking and answering - take a look. 

According to reports, we captured, roughly, 1.2 trillion digital photos last year and that's only set to grow!  

The reason for the massive increase is because almost everyone now has a smartphone in their pocket which they use to capture photos with. In fact, figures show that around 85% of us now regularly use a smartphone as our main photo capture device. 

How we take photos might be changing but what we take photos of will probably never change - family, friends, events, places and 'things' and it's no surprise that the highest percentage of images we capture are of people (77.2%). But, the regularity we capture these types of images has altered with 67% of parents now photographing their children weekly, as they grow up, when back in 1960, 55% of all photos taken were of babies.

So we've done the 'how' and 'what of' so now let's look at 'what we do' with our photos once we've captured them and it seems that photo albums, and printing, are out of favour. In a survey, the question: 'what are you most likely to do with the photos that you take?' and the majority either leave them in smartphone photo galleries or on computers. 1% more do print them in comparison with those sharing on social media or up to the cloud, which is a little surprising, but unsurprisingly, there's a generational divide when it comes to those who print and share images in albums with people aged 55 and over having, on average, 8 photo albums and 11 framed photos in their homes. This drops to 4 photo albums and 11 framed photos for the 24-34 age category. 

With more people opting to use the cloud or simply leave images on smartphones, but with the risk of theft, technical errors and accidents, how safe are our images really if we're not copying/printing them? 

On average, an adult captures 440 photos per year but 113 smartphones are lost or stolen each minute and with 30% of people never backing their photos up, quite a few could lose their images in a blink. In fact, 31% of people surveyed have already lost important photos/videos after losing a smartphone. Plus, even if you do back up images to the Cloud the survey revealed that 50% of those surveyed wouldn't know how to access photos from here if someone asked them to. 

Looking at the figures, there are some actions some of us need to be taking in order to keep our images safe, which could include actually printing photos, creating multiple backups and ensuring other family members know how to access images. 

Thanks to Mark Lord Photography for sharing the information with us.