Thanks to EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) metadata, it’s not hard to find out which camera was used to take a photo, the date and even the settings used. This includes not only digital SLRs, but smartphones as well. With this information available, image-sharing site Flickr was able to figure out the most popular brands and devices its users have been wielding over the past year.
If you’re even remotely interested in photography, you’ll know that the two most popular brands among prosumers are Canon and Nikon and while these two do dominant the figures, there is one brand that’s caught up: Apple.
According to Petapixel’s Michael Zhang, Canon has the largest representation, coming in as the source of 13.4 per cent of the site’s photos. Which brand was in second place? If you guessed Nikon, you’d be wrong. It’s Apple, with 9.6 per cent, though Nikon was just 0.3 per cent less.
Unsurprisingly, Canon also came out on top for the most popular DSLR, at 2.4 per cent with the 7D, though the figures suggest that Nikon is just as popular, also snagging 2.4 per cent with its D7000, going by official numbers. This means it must have only missed out by the smallest of percentage points.
As for smartphones? Well, it’s all Apple, with the iPhone 5, 4S, 4 and 5c taking out the top four spots and Samsung’s Galaxy S3 slipping in at fifth.
Flickr’s data isn’t an iron-clad assessment of the internet’s most popular shooters — there’s likely a larger representation of amateur and professional photographers compared to say, Instagram — but it does let us know that, more and more, smartphones are good enough if you want to snap nice pictures without the fuss of aperture settings and multiple lenses. That said, nothing really beats a quality DSLR, tripod and a bit of patience.