We Now Take More Photos in 2 Minutes Than the Entire 1800s

Think about the last photo you took. Maybe it was your lunch, your cat doing something weird, or a sunset that looked better in person. Now consider this: in the time it took you to snap that shot and the next one, humanity collectively took more photographs than existed in the entire 19th century.

That's not hyperbole. That's math.

The 19th Century's Photographic Output

Photography was born in 1839 when Louis Daguerre unveiled the daguerreotype process. For the next 60 years, taking a photograph was an event. You sat motionless for minutes. You paid a professional. You probably only owned a handful of photographs your entire life.

Historians estimate that roughly 1,000 photographs survive from the entire 19th century. Some estimates go higher—perhaps a few thousand—but we're talking about a rounding error compared to modern output.

Then Smartphones Happened

By 2011, when this statistic first made waves, the numbers had become absurd:

• Facebook users were uploading 250 million photos per day
• Flickr hosted over 6 billion images
• The average smartphone user took dozens of photos weekly

Do the math: at 250 million photos daily on Facebook alone, that's about 347,000 photos per minute. Every two minutes? Nearly 700,000 images—vastly exceeding the entire photographic output of the 1800s.

It's Only Gotten More Extreme

That 2011 figure is almost quaint now. By 2023, estimates suggest humans take over 1.4 trillion photos annually. That's roughly 2.7 million photos per minute. In two minutes, we now capture what might exceed the entire photographic output of human history up to 1990.

The shift isn't just about quantity—it's about what we photograph. Victorian-era subjects were formal portraits, architectural studies, and historic documentation. Today's subjects include receipts for expense reports, screenshots of memes, and seventeen nearly identical selfies where you're trying to get the lighting right.

The Preservation Paradox

Here's the strange twist: despite taking trillions of photos, we might actually preserve fewer meaningful images than our ancestors did. Those 1,000 daguerreotypes from the 1800s were carefully stored, catalogued, and maintained. Your phone's camera roll? Probably synced to a cloud service that may or may not exist in 50 years.

The Victorians took few photos but treated each one as precious. We take millions and delete them without a second thought—or worse, lose them to dead hard drives and abandoned social media accounts.

So the next time you're taking your fifth attempt at a food photo, remember: you're participating in an explosion of image-making that would have seemed like science fiction to the pioneers who waited 15 minutes for a single exposure. Whether that's progress or madness depends entirely on how good that lunch actually looked.