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iPhone Camera Usage Drops Sharply on Flickr ... But There's a Reason


Last month we reported on the relative popularity of the iPhone on popular photo-sharing site Flickr: popular enough to vie for and reach the #1 spot.

That a camera phone could eclipse popular photographer mainstays like the Canon EOS Digital Rebel, Nikon's D-Series and others spoke highly of how much people value taking images on the go from a device that's always in their pockets.

Recently though, TheNextWeb noticed a dropoff in photos referencing the iPhone at Flickr. A commenter on TUAW then noticed what may actually be the culprit in the iPhone dip: Apple itself.

EXIF Data Change

As it turns out, with the new iPhone OS 3.1 update, Apple made a change to the EXIF data included in each photo taken with the iPhone camera. EXIF data is metadata about the image itself that's embedded in image file; it typically includes information about what type of camera took the photo, for example.

os31Whereas before the EXIF metadata simply identified the camera as "Apple iPhone," with the new 3.1 update the different iPhone models are differentiated into "iPhone," "iPhone 3G" and "iPhone 3GS." In other words, the "Apple iPhone" line item in the above graph is now splintered into three different sources, and over time has taken a resulting dip.

Still, iPhone OS 3.1 was only released 5 days ago in conjunction with the Apple Rock and Roll event, so it can't completely account for the dip that actually started back in mid-August — but it certainly seems to be precipitating the continued drop.

If the theory is correct, there's also an easy solution Flickr could use to bring back a more accurate picture of the data. They would simply need to aggregate the three different models into a single line item on the graph, and/or perhaps offer some sort of way to view iPhone usage data as both separate models and as a total aggregate count together. We hope they choose the latter, as it would be interesting to see if people end up enjoying and using the 3-megapixel camera with autofocus in the 3GS moreso than the 2-megapixel version in the original and 3G iPhones.

If you're an iPhone user, do you find yourself taking more photos on the go than you used to? What service(s) do you use to share your images?

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