How many photos are taken every day?
How many photos are taken every day?
roughly 5 billion a day — about 2 trillion a year
Roughly 250 photographs a year for every person alive, taken by a population where perhaps 4.8 billion own a camera-equipped phone.
Somewhere around 2 trillion photographs are taken each year, which works out at roughly 5 billion a day or 57,000 a second. About 90% are taken on phones. For scale, the total number of photographs taken in the entire 20th century is usually estimated in the low hundreds of billions — so a few months of current output exceeds a hundred years of film photography. Only a small fraction are ever looked at twice.
How the figure is arrived at
Smartphone install base multiplied by an average capture rate per user per year, calibrated against cloud upload volumes that Apple, Google and Meta occasionally disclose. Both inputs are soft and the estimates from different analysts differ by roughly a factor of two, so treat the figure as an order of magnitude.
How confident it is
- Low estimate
- 4,000,000,000
- High estimate
- 6,000,000,000
- Spread
- 1.5× between the bounds
Other every day counts
- How many babies are born each day? about 360,000 — roughly four every second
- How many people die each day? about 170,000 — roughly two every second
- How many Google searches are made every day? roughly 8.5 billion — about 100,000 a second
- How many emails are sent every day? about 360 billion
- How many times does your heart beat in a lifetime? about 2.5 billion
- How many cups of coffee are drunk every day? roughly 2.5 billion
- How many steps do you take in a lifetime? roughly 150 million — about 110,000 km
- How many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? 500 hours a minute — about 720,000 hours a day
- How many pizzas are sold every day? somewhere between 3 and 8 million a day in the United States
- How many words do we speak a day? about 16,000
- How many breaths do you take in a lifetime? about 600 million
- How many messages are sent every day? about 100 billion on WhatsApp alone
Common questions
- How many photos are taken every day?
- roughly 5 billion a day — about 2 trillion a year
- How is that estimated?
- Smartphone install base multiplied by an average capture rate per user per year, calibrated against cloud upload volumes that Apple, Google and Meta occasionally disclose. Both inputs are soft and the estimates from different analysts differ by roughly a factor of two, so treat the figure as an order of magnitude.
Related pages
- How many babies are born each day? about 360,000 — roughly four every second
- How many people die each day? about 170,000 — roughly two every second
- How many Google searches are made every day? roughly 8.5 billion — about 100,000 a second
- How many emails are sent every day? about 360 billion
- How many times does your heart beat in a lifetime? about 2.5 billion
- How many cups of coffee are drunk every day? roughly 2.5 billion
- How many steps do you take in a lifetime? roughly 150 million — about 110,000 km
- How many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? 500 hours a minute — about 720,000 hours a day
- How many people are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
- How many stars are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many countries are there in the world? Things people built
- How many bones are in the human body? The human body
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? Living things and the natural world
- How many ants are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
Sources
- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place