People around the world are expected to take an estimated 1 trillion digital photos this year. That’s three times as many as we took five years ago. If you printed them all out in regular 4x6 photo size and lay them in a line, they would wrap around the world two and a half times!

There’s no doubt that smartphones have changed the way we see the world and capture memories of our daily lives. Our phones are filled with moments that we never had the opportunity to snap before. We take slow-mo videos, panos, 3D photos, selfies, GIFs, and beautifully framed photos of our breakfast bircher muesli.

We wanted to learn more, so we asked 1000 Aussies how they are taking photos and how they use them. We found some interesting trends, like the fact that one in seven Aussies take more than 2000 photos every year—and that’s just on their smartphones!

Here are a few more findings:

• For two-thirds of us, our smartphone is our favourite device to take photos 
• Despite the ever-present selfie, Aussies aren’t self-obsessed — we say that we mostly take photos of our friends and family (44%), followed closely by scenery and landscapes (38%), and our pets (23%) 
• Nine in ten of us look back at our old photos, with one in five looking at them at least once a week 

But no matter how much we love our photos, many Aussies find it difficult to know what to do with them!

We mostly store our images on our smartphones or an external hard drive, but this isn’t always foolproof. Almost half of Aussies said they had lost precious snaps because their computer or hard drive died (18%), they accidentally deleted them (15%), they got a new phone and didn’t copy them across (15%), or they lost the USB/hard drive (8%).

About a third of us have had to delete photos off our phones in order to clear memory and make more room.

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are now more than 100 million people around the world using Google Photos. With Google Photos you can store unlimited photos and videos in the cloud, so you never have to worry about where those photos are.

That’s not the only cool feature. Search on Google Photos allows you to find a particular photo just by typing in what you’re looking for — find all your beach photos for instance, just by searching “ocean” or “sand”.

We also recently made it easier to share photos with close family and friends, through Shared Albums. Now you can share entire albums of your recent trip down the coast or the best photos from the Christmas party with friends and loved ones by SMS, email, messaging apps and more. Better yet, the albums are collaborative, so everyone with access to the album can add their own photos too. 

Google Photos is available across Android, iOS and the web so it’s easy to get started and make sure you never lose a precious memory again.

Posted by Shane Treeves, Communications Manager, Google Australia