iPhone 4 About To Be Flickr's Top Camera. Point & Shoots? Pretty Much The Opposite.
What's the most popular camera used in terms of pictures taken that are uploaded to Flickr? Right now, it's the Nikon D90. But in about a month or so, it will be Apple's iPhone 4.
Context & Ripple Effects
The iPhone had already established a strong Flickr presence in 2008, and Flickr's native iPhone app lowered the friction of uploading from the handset. The iPhone 4's camera had also been judged ahead of competing smartphones in 2010, making its projected move past Nikon's D90 a measure of usage rather than merely device sales.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a visible usage proof point as the iPhone 4 is projected to displace Nikon's D90 atop Flickr's camera-upload rankings.
- Nikon's D90 loses the platform's leading position, while Flickr's photo stream becomes more heavily shaped by phone-originated images.
Second-order effects
- Point-and-shoot cameras face a sharper convenience disadvantage: a separate camera must still transfer images before they reach Flickr, while the iPhone combines capture and upload.
- Flickr's iPhone app becomes more strategically important to Flickr because it serves the device category producing the most uploads.
Third-order effects
- If Flickr usage continues to favor connected phones over standalone cameras, camera competition will increasingly be decided by the software and sharing path around the lens, not image hardware alone.
The trend: Connected smartphones are consolidating capture and distribution in one device, pressuring standalone cameras whose workflow ends at the memory card.