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Flickr is the most outstanding slide show carousel in the world. And profound photographers love to let their audience know that they’re using the most excellent cameras to fill it.
While Instagram has evolved into a platform for reminiscences and ‘content,’ Flickr is where photographic quality and technique set the agenda. Although Flickr lost some attention when camera phone photography and social media became popular in the late 2000s, it remains a gathering place for professionals and enthusiasts to share their ideas and discoveries.
The technique is hard won, but comprehending the camera, lens, f-stop, etc., that a photographer used to get a particular effect narrows down the variables. And, thanks to the metadata-storing capabilities of digital camera devices, the photographers on Flickr have a tendency to share their set-up by copying the metadata of their photo files alongside their snaps.
According to the SimpleGhar team, this data reveals the most popular cameras and camera phones used by photographers on Flickr around the world.
The most popular photography device brand worldwide is Apple, accounting for 150,787,710 photos on Flickr – 31.79% of the total.
The most popular model is the iPhone 11, which has 13,212,135 tags on the Flickr website.
The iPhone 12 Pro Max is the most popular camera phone in the United States.
The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is the world’s most popular standalone camera, with 11,761,586 photos on Flickr.
The Most Popular Camera Devices in Every Country
In 1990, the Dycam Model 1 became the first digital camera available for purchase in stores. However, it would take some time before digital cameras would become widely accessible, affordable, and of high quality. As late as 2001, photographic films were still the norm among professionals. However, digital workflows and the urgency to swiftly distribute images on the internet propelled the technology’s advancement. By 2004, digital SLR camera sales reached annual sales of 2.5 million. The year following, Sony and Konica Minolta united, leading the industry to unprecedented growth.
The world map below shows that, nowadays, Canon cameras lead in 38 countries, including the United States, where the EOS 5D Mark IV reigns supreme.
The top Japanese brand today, however, is not Sony, but Canon. The Canon EOS R3 is a mirrorless camera with high-performance capabilities designed for sports, wildlife, and journalism. Capable of stunning action photography, thanks to its Eye Control autofocus that selects the focus point by tracking your human eye and a top shutter speed of 1/64,000sec.
But while Canon is the camera brand of choice in 38 nations, only Ireland and Sweden share the R3 as their most frequently used along with Japan. Boasting 11.7 million photos on Flickr, the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is the most popular of all, topping a ranking that counts 11 other Canon models. ExpertPhotography.com writes that Canon’s “image quality and contrast are consistently excellent.” Sony’s A7 III is the second-most popular, a camera given an outstanding five-star rating by PCMag.
The Most Popular Camera Brands Used to Photograph the World
Although Japanese camera brands might dominate the most frequently used camera models on Flick, but open the field up to camera phones, and things get a little more international. The top 10 brands of photography devices used on the site include Apple and Google (U.S.), Samsung (South Korea), and Huawei (China) – but all other brands are Japanese.
Over half of all Flickr photos are taken by Apple and Canon. Apple iPhones 11 through 13 are responsible for the lion’s share. For information, Apple has been the most used camera brand on Flickr since 2015, when measured by the percentage of photographers using Apple devices rather than the number of photos they took.
The Most Popular Camera Phones in Every Country
Phones with in-built cameras were once the cutting edge, but nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find a smartphone without one.
According to the map below Apple iPhones dominate worldwide.
Honing in on South Korea — where an Avast study found that people store more phone snaps than any other country — the iPhone 12 Pro takes the crown. Not every country is enamored with the iPhone, though — Samsung camera phones take the top spot in 13 countries.
As reflected in Flickr data, the iPhone 12 Pro Max is the most popular camera phone in the United States, and models from the iPhone 7 to the 14 Pro are the most popular in 62 of 87 countries.
The new 14 Pro boasts achingly sharp images and better light handling than previous models thanks to Apple’s Photonic Engine and hardware tweaks.
Despite being superseded by newer models and being the most popular camera phone in only five countries, the iPhone 11 takes more photos than any other device. It helps that it outperforms the popularity chart in China.
Methodology
To determine the most popular camera brands, camera devices, and camera phones used worldwide, the SimpleGhar team considered more than 470 million photos that have been uploaded to Flickr and tagged with the name of the machine that was used to photograph.
To find the most popular camera and camera phone used to photograph in every nation, the team studied up to 5 thousand of the most recent photos uploaded to Flickr.com in the world’s 100 most populated countries. They then rated which camera and camera phone model was tagged most often as the gadget used to take the photos within each nation.
Their final rankings removed any nations that were heavily skewed (50 percent or more photos) by one Flickr user.
The data for this analysis was gathered in March 2023.
