I wrote before about the 20k photos I have in Photos (and more accurately, on some servers somewhere in iCloud). I’ve been trying to clean up my collection, mostly organized using a mix of albums and smart albums. I noticed that I had been in the habit of making smart albums for each phone I had: iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, etc. I added my last two phones as smart albums and took a look at the totals. So here’s the big picture:
| iPhone 3G | iPhone 4 | iPhone 5 | iPhone 6 | iPhone 7 | iPhone 10 | iPhone 11 Pro Max | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Photos | 972 | 1780 | 2048 | 1974 | 1802 | 2122 | 838 | 11536 |
| Videos | 0 | 268 | 135 | 27 | 57 | 47 | 17 | 551 |
| Months in Service | 10 | 23 | 24 | 23 | 23 | 19 | 6 | 128 |
The big picture is that I take about a thousand pictures a year. Because I tend to keep my phones for about two years, that’s around 2k pictures a year. My first iPhone was an exception: I only took about 1000 pictures in the time that I had it. I don’t remember being especially judicious with it. Apple must have added the device information to the photo metadata at some point in the iPhone 3G’s lifetime, because the earliest pictures include “Apple iPhone” in the file metadata, while “iPhone 3G” doesn’t show up until mid-September of 2009.
My shutterbugging reached a peak with the iPhone 5, then dipped a bit again until the X came out. You can say that each phone offered a greatly improved camera, but the X really blew me away. Until I got the 11, of course.
And the 11 is interesting to look at. I’ve only had it for about a quarter of the life that I typically keep an iPhone, but I’ve already taken 800 photos. Assuming that I keep up that pace, I will be adding about 2400 photos over the lifespan of the device.
Videos are a different story, and here the data surprised me. I was apparently smitten with the ability to take video with the iPhone 4 (I took video because I could), but my interest waned to a nadir of 27 with the iPhone 6 Plus, and leveled out to about 50 per device ever since. In terms of file space, though, video accounts for around 20 GB of my Photos library; this represents about a third of my 60 GB library.
There are photos and videos from other sources, too. I was adding pictures to my iPhoto library for almost nine years before I got an iPhone. And since April of 2013, I’ve taken over 5,000 photos with an Olympus E-PL5 mirrorless camera, which I still take with me when it’s feasible (I blame Shawn Blanc’s review for inspiring the purchase). It’s hard to believe it’s seven years old and still takes amazing pictures (thanks in no small part to a pricey but Panasonic Lumix F1.7 prime lens, with which I’ve taken over 2000 photos).