The most popular camera on the site is the iPhone 4, and has been for some time. Of course, this is mostly out of convenience – so many people are walking around with their Apple smartphones on them at all times. Of course a popular smartphone with a decent camera is going to be incredibly well-represented on a photo sharing site.

But the brand new iPhone 4S is making a surge on Flickr. It is now the second-most popular camera phone in use on the site.

As you can see, the iPhone 4 still holds a dominating lead over the 4S. Yesterday, 72,656 photos taken with the 4 were uploaded to the site. Compare that with the 4S, which only saw 21,899 uploads. But while you can see the the iPhone 4 has peaked and is on a slow decline, iPhone 4S usage has exploded since its launch in October.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Flickr is heavily populated with iPhone camera users. And the iPhone 4S has been a great seller (over 4 million its first weekend), due in large part to its 8 megapixel camera that’s been getting rave reviews. As far as smartphone cameras go, it’s up there at the top.

It has a ways to go, but it probably won’t be too long before the iPhone 4S becomes the most widely used smartphone camera on Flickr. And with Apple’s track record of holding top overall spot on Flickr, the iPhone 4S could become the most widely used camera of any type on Flickr.

That, of course, assumes that the iPhone 5 of the future doesn’t come along too soon and relegate the 4S camera to a distant thing of the past.

[Lead Image taken with iPhone 4S. Courtesy]

Such is the case with the Nightmares Fear Factory‘s index of images. What we have is a haunted house in Niagara Falls taking pictures of its visitors right as they are being spooked, and posting them to their Flickr account.

The results, as you can see in the lead image, are simply fantastic. In fact, I’m having a hard time coming up with a more impressive use of Flickr’s service, although, I’m sure someone will correct me if necessary. In Nightmares Fear Factory’s Flickr stream, there are 20 pages of images to pick and choose from, and you won’t be disappointed with any of the offerings. However, to entice you even further, here are a few more examples of what you can expect:

What other Flickr accounts are you most fond of? Is there one that’s even better than Nightmares Fear Factory? Let us know what you think.

The Flickr Android app promises photo sharing, filter enhancement, and the ability to share these creations across multiple social network platforms, which is pretty much what Instagram does for the iPhone crowd. The Android app shared its debut with another Flickr launch, a service called Photo Session. According to the Flickr blog, Photo Session allows users to:

… flip through photos with your friends from anywhere in the world. Just create a Photo Session, invite your friends and browse photos together in real-time. When you move to the next photo it moves for everyone else too. While you’re all browsing, have fun chatting and drawing on your photos using the built-in tools.

Unlike the Instagram imitation, Photo Session is supported by the iOS family, so you can use it on your iPhone and iPad. There’s a video of Photo Session in action, and it too takes some cues from Instagram, especially with the filters and the sharing:

While Flickr boasts 68 million registered users of its own, the platform is likely jealous of Instagram, which has amassed a whopping 10 million users in less than a year since launching.

Is it really jealously that led to the development of the similar application, or did Flickr simply fill a hole the Instagram makers were unwilling or unable to do? Sure, the app comparisons are valid, but if the demand for the application on the Android environment is there, and no one has stepped up to meet it, it sounds like Flickr merely struck while the iron was hot.

Kudos to them for stepping up where Instagram did not. The next question is, will the Flickr Android app be as popular as its iPhone predecessor?

While Imgur is not quite as big as Flickr, at least in regards to Alexa, its frequent use in the Reddit community has catapulted the image hosting service into the top 50 sites in the United States, but the numbers go quite a bit farther than that. In the thread that brought this information to light, a link goes to Imgur’s statistics page, and the results are pretty eye-opening.

The graphic, which leads this post, indicates that Imgur boasts the following:

• 8,701,524 images uploaded a month
• 7,831,159,587 images viewed a month
• 1196577471303.7 megabytes of bandwidth used a month

For those who don’t like to convert large numbers into smaller ones, that, as the post title informs us, is over a Petabyte of bandwidth a month, or just in case large numbers are your thing, a quadrillion bytes, or, 1000 terabytes. That’s a whopping amount of bandwidth going to entertain the Reddit masses, but it also shows just how popular images are with the Reddit crowd.

Then there’s all the Tumblr/RSS Reader sharing of the Imgur-hosted images, which helps propel the service to such a respectable heights. As indicated, the Alexa rankings for Imgur are quite strong. In fact, Imgur is actually a more popular site than Reddit, with Imgur coming in at 42. Reddit, on the other hand, comes in at 45.

For comparison’s sake, Flickr ranks 26th, which stands to reason considering just how long Flickr’s popular service been around (Flickr launched in 2004). While the amount of images Imgur hosts in comparison to Flickr may not be equal–Flickr recently announced its 6 billionth image–Imgur does experience almost 9 million uploads a month, and considering it was launched five years after Flickr, it’s easy to quantify Imgur’s exponential growth.

For further comparison’s sake, Imgur is more popular than Photobucket and Google’s Picasa, services that have been around a lot longer than Imgur. Granted, nothing comes close to Facebook’s massive array of image uploads–almost 100 billion images in Facebook’s photo database–but the fact that essentially one site, Reddit, made Imgur what it is today deserves notice.

Funny, I don’t remember Digg making a new image hosting service explode like that.

The storm hit over the weekend, attacking the coast of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and later New York City and parts of New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Here are some quick stats about the impact of Irene:

• 700K are without power in both Connecticut and Massachusetts
• 284K without power in Rhode Island and 600K in New Jersey
• Throughout the entire east coast, upwards of 6 million home and businesses are without power today
• Damage estimates total around $3 million
• At some point, every single road in Vermont except for I-89 and I-91 has been closed for flooding
• At least 28 confirmed casualties attributed to the storm

About those casualties, the AP has a list of the deceased, complete with the causes of death. For instance, an 85 year-old woman in Maryland was killed when a tree knocked a chimney through her sunroof. And in New York, a man was electrocuted as he tried to help a young child who was in a flooded street with downed power lines.

Obviously, Hurricane Irene has had a tremendous impact on the east coast. But it didn’t quite live up to the apocalyptic hype that dominated the airwaves for the days leading up to the event. Most notably, NYC was not hit with the force that was predicted. The Oatmeal has a great comic today about the unpredictability of weather and the hype machine that attempts to predict it.

The disclaimer reads as such:

The point of this comic wasn’t to undermine the damage of Irene or imply that we all wanted more destruction, it was to highlight two different things:

1. The weather on this planet is very, very fickle. The worst disasters aren’t the ones we see broadcasted on CNN days before they happen, with newscasters promoting which Twitter hash tag you should use meanwhile situating their cameras to maximize the dramatic effect of floodwater. The worst disasters come out of nowhere with very little warning, such as the Japanese tsunami or hurricane Katrina.

2. Hurricane Irene was a hype-fest of epic proportions and I’m betting whoever runs The Weather Channel is probably buying himself another mega-yacht this week.

This brings up a good point. Did you feel like the lead-up hype to Hurricane Irene was a little more extreme than normal? Sure, we should be used to doomsday weather predictions, Irene isn’t the first storm that we have obsessed over. But was Irene more bark than bite?

But even if Irene was hyped to epic proportions, is that really a bad thing? Many on Twitter are talking about the criticism of the “media hype.”

People took to Flickr to share their photos of the Hurricane’s aftermath –

[Credits: Flickr accounts of Mrs, Gemstone, D. Fletcher, j3net and Edwin Martinez1, respectively]

In other social media news, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley decided to do some live reporting on the Hurricane in NYC. He posted photos and videos on his Flickr account documenting the (sometimes less than impressive) damage that Irene caused to his car and apartment. Here’s a video he posted from East River Park-

And let’s not forget what the Lord Almighty had to say about the Hurricane –

Our well wishes go out to everyone affected by Irene.

[Lead Image Courtesy]

The Greater Manchester Police have even set up a YouTube page, and the latest video discusses “Shop a Looter” program, where images of the wanted rioters and looters will be posted on their Flickr page and as well as billboards and advertising vans that drive around the city. There’s also a video discussing the program, and it’s evident from Assistant Chief Constable Garry Shewan’s delivery, if the Manchester police have their way, they’ll punish everyone who was involved with the Manchester rioting:

Currently, there are 68 items listed on the GMP’s Flickr stream, and, as you can see, there’s no escaping the quality of the images being uploaded:

While the GMP’s use of YouTube and Flickr is a lesson in effective social media use, the police force has been an absolute animal on their Twitter account, doing their social networking best to catch the rioters. Some examples, including the awesome response that came after the lead arrest video was posted:

And yes, both of those “can you identify these suspects” tweets go to separate Flickr pages.

What are your thoughts on using social media coupled with law enforcement? Does the open acknowledgement of the police doing their jobs–in this case, effectively–make you feel any safer or more like living in a police state? Considering the rioters were smart enough to show their faces in the land of CCTV, it’s their own fault if they get caught, no matter what means were used to detain them.

Image courtesy.

“Over the last 5 years uploads have been increasing 20% year-over-year and we love hitting a milestone like this,” says Flickr’s Kay Kremerskothen. “It’s the ability to wander through the titles, tags, geotags, camera info, groups, comments, favs, and everything else associated with the photos that make the huge collection of photos on Flickr so unique. The more photos you upload, the more we all can explore.”

Here’s the six billionth photo. It is a nice one.

It was uploaded by user eon60 on Monday. I’m not sure why they waited until today to announce it.

6 billion is a lot of photos, and may seem impressive until you realize that Flickr’s been around since 2004. There’s an infographic from Pixable going around that claims Facebook is expected to have 100 billion photos by the end of the summer.

Not to turn the discussion away from Flickr and Yahoo, but I recently talked about how Google+ has made Picasa Web Albums cool again. If Google gets Instant Upload on the iPhone version, and keeps the growth of Google+ going strong, it will be interesting to see how it competes with Facebook in the photos category moving forward.

In what may come as a surprise, the current most popular camera used at Flickr isn’t exactly a camera. Don’t get me wrong, it has picture-taking capabilities, quite obviously, but it’s not a exclusively a camera, either. Naturally, it’s the iPhone 4, although, the device just recently overtook the Nikon D90. In relation to the surprising aspect of such data, perhaps it shouldn’t be. The iPhone is, without a doubt, one of the most popular personal devices in the United States — still — and because so many people have them, it stands to reason a lot of people would uploading images to popular photo storage services.

What is surprising, however, is the iPhone 4 is the only mobile communication device (I’m not sure “phone” is an appropriate moniker anymore) to make Flickr’s list. No Androids here. Furthermore, when measuring the popular cameraphones used on Flickr, you see Apple products representing four out of the top five brands. In regards to the rapidly-growing Android market, perhaps they will make inroads on later Flickr graphs, but then again, the iPhone 5 will be out soon.

Speaking of graphs, here’s the primary “most popular camera” breakdown. Immediately, you’ll notice iPhone’s overtaking of the Nikon D90 only happened recently. You’ll also see Ashton Kutcher’s second career — well, besides being an incessant Twitter user — represented nicely, as well:

Enlarge

These graphs show the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo or video with a particular camera on a given day over the last year.

The graphs are “normalized”, which is a fancy way of saying that they automatically correct for the fact that more people join Flickr each day: the graph moving up or down indicates a change in the camera’s popularity relative to all other cameras used by Flickr members.

The graphs are only accurate to the extent that we can automatically detect the camera used to take the photo or shoot the video (about 2/3rds of the time). That is not usually possible with cameraphones, therefore they are under-represented.

As indicated, not only is the iPhone the most popular camera on Flickr, Apple also rules the mobile device/cameraphone breakdown as well:

Lead image courtesy.

The image of President Obama, Veep Joe Biden, Secretary of State Clinton and other VIPS as they “receive an update on the mission against Osama Bin Laden” has already been discussed to the point of exhaustion by careful, scrutinizing eyes. Since the photo was released, we have learned that the Navy SEAL team that performed the operation wore head cams, and the White House watched live stream of the mission. Could this photo-moment be the exact moment where they were watching it go down? Hillary Clinton’s reaction sure suggests that something interesting was happening on the screen.

And then there are the other observations. Why isn’t General Marshall Webb looking? What could possibly be on that document that the White House felt the need to obscure? All the coffee cups have official seals? Awesome!

Anyways, this image is now part of the national consciousness, and now there are some stats to prove it. TechCrunch has received some figures about the photo from Flickr. The photo was posted at 10am PDT – check out the exponential rate of views:

390,000 views at 3:30pm (5.5 hours later at 71,000 views per hour),
 600,000 at 5pm (7 hours later at 140,000 views/hour) and 
1,400,000 at 11am today (25 hours later at 44,000 views/hour). The White House Flickr account averages 100K views per day, and yesterday it received 2.5 million views, and as of 7pm today it already had 3.6 million views an order of magnitude greater than normal.

As of right now, the photo has over 1.64 million views on Flickr. The most viewed photo currently is a 5-year-old photo of Nohkalikai Falls, Cherrapunjee. It has just under 3 million views. 5 years to get 3 million against 2 days to get 1 and a half million? Yeah, it’s looking likely that the “situation room” pic will steal the crown as most viewed pretty soon.

As mememakers are already having a field day with the death of Bin Laden, the “situation room” pic is, of course, its own meme – prompting the best work of those mememakers across the interwebs. The first one to emerge shows Jersey Shore’s “The Situation” standing behind Obama in the “situation room.” I refuse to show that one, as it really does go too far. *Shudder*

These, on the other hand, are winners:

“Situation Room” photo via White House Flickr stream.

To head off speculation, this move doesn’t necessarily relate to Yahoo’s decline or any planned changes at Flickr. Rothenberg wrote in a blog post, “Against all odds (and in the oddest of places), I have met someone who having a future with is more important to me than any job could ever be. Leaving Flickr behind will allow me to focus more passionately on investing in a future with her.”

Also, Rothenberg feels Flickr remains in capable hands. He later added, “I need to pass on the torch to the next generation of Flickreenos, all of whom have a clear mission, sense of purpose, and the drive and talent to get it done. I know that they are up for the task.”

Still, this does represent a blow for Yahoo and Flickr. Rothenberg noted that he was either employee number 12 or 13 at Flickr, and he’s helped the organization in a number of important ways (including establishing partnerships with Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, and RIM).

It’s hardly a secret that Yahoo’s been losing all sorts of key employees in recent weeks and months, either.

Anyway, Markus Spiering, a (former) senior product manager at Flickr, will replace Rothenberg on at least a temporary basis.