13 
We’ve been taking pictures for almost 200 years now, and we sure aren’t slowing down. But how many pictures have we taken all together, since photography existed? Well the short answer is around 3.5 trillion, but there’s a lot more nuance than just a flat number. Vsauce looked into the matter in more detail, and some of the facts might surprise you. How many of the pictures are actually good? That’s anyone’s guess. [YouTube]
nonsense. it absolutely has to be many many trillions more than 3.5 trillion.
the average video camera takes a stream of 30 individual still images a second. how can we say that those images don’t count? every single one of those frames is a viewable still image captured by a camera.
the true number including all video stills ever taken is mindblowingly large.
A photograph is different than a video in that the technology and intention behind them are different, so I would say the 3.5 trillion mark stands. While I see your point that at its core a video is just a collection of stills played in succession the point stands.
If you want to get technical . . . . most video these days, and certainly the overwhelming majority of online video, uses a long GOP codec like (h.264), so rather than storing – for example – 30 individual frames per second – they store a keyframe and then a series of frames that only record the spatial difference between that keyframe and the next, so in effect the majority of the frames don’t exist on their own and rely on the codec to generate them when decoding.
this is sort of a moot point since no video ever starts its life out as h264. its starts are raw snapshots from a cmos/ccd which are then subsequently compressed using h264. even so, each one of those frames still exists and is a still image in its own right.
you wouldnt call the drawings that make up a flick book anything other than a drawing would you?
I’d say the distinction is that a photo exist as that single image, whether it be a .jpg, .tiff, .nef, .raw, etc. where as a video requires those frames to be removed from the source footage. I guess at a stretch you could include film movies as they exist as single frames on the negative just as a film photo does, but as Brad says below you’d then have to look at the intention for the captured images.
Youtube alone gathers 3.4 trillion individual frames a year – assuming their claim of 60 hours of footage is uploaded a minute and assuming 30 fps, obviously the actual figure will be lower once you take into account some footage is 24/25 fps, but as a guide YouTube gathers around the same number of individual images / frames a year as all the photographs taken throughout history.
Putting aside still images taken from video, the figures in this video are mistaken, they say 3.5 trillion images have been taken since the advent of photography and then they say 4 billion of those were taken in the last year alone . . . . but obviously those figures just don’t stack up, either the 3.5 trillion figure or the 4 billion figure is wrong.
That’s a good point, even if we assumed there had been no growth in the amount of photos taken each year and they were taking 4 billion every year that’d still require nearly 900 years, where as the first photo was taken less than 200 years ago.