I just wrote about this on my blog, but at the risk of being a spammer I won’t post the direct link here. I believe the link is in my profile – but I guess by mentioning it, I just shilled it anyway.
I have been thinking about the number of photos that I take and have taken over the past few years. I didn’t realize you could simply type the year into the searchbox in Photos and it would give you a count.
Tallying up my numbers, I can confirm my gut feeling that I take far fewer photos now than I did prior to the pandemic.
It makes sense to me that I took fewer photos over the course of lockdowns/working from home, but that number has stayed low for me.
My kids are older and I try to use social media less, but I’m finding now that I will actually attend a party or event and not take a single picture because it never occurs to me. I’d like to capture more moving forward.
Have you, my fellow MPU’ers also noticed fewer opportunities to snap photos? Did the pandemic alter our photography in any way?
I find my rapid decline interesting. 
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Kind of the same. My stream of models dried up.
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The pandemic certainly massively reduced the number of photos I take. Age and no travel to new places have both reduced this since. I’ve hardly used my DSLR gear. Nowdays just an occasional snapshot with my iPhone does just fine.
It’s a well known “fact” that the most pictures are taken from birth to toddlerhood of ones firstborn child. In my case that was nearly 50 years ago.
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From looking at my own library, I take more photos than ever, but I can’t put it down to a particular behaviour or reason. My daughters are 22 and 24, our Dog is 8, There’s nothing “special” happening, but the number of photos I take has increased
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If anything I started taking even more photos during the pandemic—what else was there to do besides go outside with my camera and document what New York City was like during that strange and unsettling time? (Often it looked like this:)
I’ve kept up that pace ever since, but then photography is my passion and I’d be out there with my camera every day if I could. More caveats: I don’t take photos at social events unless I’m specifically asked to do so, rarely photograph friends and family, and have to be goaded into posting anything to Instagram. It’s a good thing no one is relying on me to document the course of our lives and share it! I do enjoy using strangers’ own phones to take pictures of them when they’re posing in front of some landmark or other: it’s my civic duty to make them look better than they would in a selfie using the front-facing camera. 
PS: At lease three of the people in this photo are waiting to take pictures of the red tailed hawks that live in or around Tompkins Square Park. I never saw so many people walking around the city with cameras as I did during the pandemic.
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Consider it a celebration of the great gift of being alive in the world. That’s special enough.
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2015-2024. (2016 was an Android experiment.) 2021 probably has burst photos that need cleaned up, but also, that’s the year my kids started taking a lot more photos with my phone. And 2023 was the year they had a hand-me-down iPhone with a good camera. 
Most of my photos are of people so travel ups and downs haven’t affected me much.
I’d be interested in a query to identify more intentional photos (evidence that settings were altered, maybe.)
Edit: now with osxphotos query --not-burst --not-screenshot --location --count --year 20xx in parentheses.
2015: 104 (80)
2016: 24 (12)
2017: 295 (225)
2018: 439 (332)
2019: 500 (349)
2020: 688 (512)
2021: 2,950 (2740 🤔)
2022: 1,611 (1627 🤔🤔)
2023: 1,161 (954)
2024: 789 (571)
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osxphotos is always the right answer 
https://rhettbull.github.io/osxphotos/cli.html#osxphotos-query
Curious to get to my laptop soon to find out as well
Would be so cool if there was a Spotify Wrapped for your photo library!
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Good call–not the results I expected in a couple years…
Most of my photos are of either the baked goods I make or cars parked with their wheels on the pavement (US: sidewalk) preventing pedestrians to walk safely along the pavement. The later happens on many roads in my English village but one in particular is worst as other motorists use it as a rat-ran to avoid a roundabout speeding down the road to beat traffic coming off the roundabout meaning any one forced to walk in the road because of these selfish drivers does so at the risk of their lives.
This feels a bit shallow, but when I look back at my yearly photo count the strongest predictor of how many I have taken appears to be how long it’s been since I upgraded my camera. That’s a pattern that stretches back decades. Travel and new pets are the most significant secondary influences. The last upgrade was in 2019. It looks like it may be time soon…
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Makes sense, every time you upgrade you get a new camera feature that allows you to take photos not possible before, e.g. Portrait Mode, the Ultrawide camera, the 5x zoom lens, etc.
Also! If you’re like me and have lots of years in your library (though many are not taken by me)
Here’s a short python script to automate the per year checking
import osxphotos
photosdb = osxphotos.PhotosDB()
for i in range(1945, 2025):
query = osxphotos.QueryOptions(burst=False,screenshot=False, photos=True, year=[i])
print(f"{I}: {len(photosdb.query(query))}")
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I got a bit carried away 
Couldn’t quite shake the concept of a Photos Wrapped!
(Forgive the blacked out PII)
If you want to give it a go, I published the code here. Unfortunately, it can’t be hosted as a website since it needs access to your local Photos DB.
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My number of photos has been steadily decreasing well before the pandemic. I think this is due to the lack of intentionality when you are carrying in your pocket the camera you would have killed for 15 years ago. I had my Canon reflex with a bunch of lenses, a Powershoot, a Lumix with ultrazoom and my last one has been a Fuji X100T, all great cams but taking pictures those days required a plan, which was basically taking the camera with you. Now you have to remember that you have an arguably faster better camera beyond using it for the proverbial Instagram beauty post.
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2024 - 4944
2023 - 13,526
2022 - 12,458
2021 - 10,441
2020 - 19,585
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This weekend I was at a family members cottage and then at a swimming pool with my kids. In both cases I was sitting there watching and then I thought of this post. I got my butt off the chair and went and took some photos. I think it’s a combination of my kids being older and losing the habit of taking photos during the pandemic when there was less opportunity to do so (from a family gathering, kids activities point of view anyway).
I also toggled “portrait” mode on for a few pics (15 Pro Max) and was quite happy with the results. I have some good entries for my Day One journal today. I need to keep it up.
