Family photos by decade

I crunched a bit of data about my ongoing photo-scanning project, which now includes some more scans as well as a heap of JPEG’s harvested from SD cards from our digital cameras.

Surprising no one, the rate of photos taken has grown dramatically over the last century:

Linear-scale graph showing the increase in number of photos taken by my family from the 1940s to the 2010s

That’s the linear scale. Here’s a prettier graph on a log scale, showing steep growth every decade:

Log-scale graph showing decade-by-decade jumps in number of photos taken by my family from the 1940s to the 2010s

These charts actually understate the case, of course. The era labeled “2010s” is really only 2010-2015 or so, peaking in 2012. After that, analog and standalone digital cameras finally gave way (in our family) to phone cameras. In the decade or so since then, I’ve taken more than this entire graph’s worth of pictures combined – which is to say nothing of the number of photos my parents, grandparents, and siblings have taken.

UPDATE: It turns out the dataset also includes lots of duplicates, but the order of magnitude by decade remains accurate. Sanitize the data first, people!

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