STUDY: More than 60% of us share our photos online

Photo apps, like Instagram and Camera+, and photo storage services, like Flickr and Picasa, are becoming increasingly popular, allowing users to take and share photos in a way that’s much easier than ever before. But how are we sharing our photos with our family and friends?

According to a new study by Futuresource Consulting, more than 60% of us are actively sharing our photos online, with Facebook being the top choice for people to store their snaps and Flickr taking second place. It’s no surprise Facebook takes the number one spot, although we love to complain about it, for most users it’s the key space online where they share everything they do, think and see. If they were to use another service to store and share their photos they’d still have to come back and upload them to Facebook anyway, so that’s why it’s usually the first port of call.

Over the past year numbers of those using both Dropbox and Google+ to store photos has shot up considerably too. Dropbox’s dedicated user base makes us think that the cloud-based storage service will continue to rise in popularity, but it’ll be interesting to see whether we’re talking about Google+ quite so much this time next year, or whether users quickly uploaded lots of photos when they signed up and won’t be uploading many more again in the future.

As you can imagine, it’s users between 18 and 34 that are most likely to be taking and sharing their photos online, but the study interestingly showed that there’s been a notably higher number of active ‘silver surfers’ in the USA over the past year, with more than 30% of those using websites being in the 55+ age group as opposed to only 19% in the UK. When they come to share their photos it’s a different story to the younger generation too, with most choosing the likes of Kodak Gallery and Snapfish to store their photography.

Futuresource conducted 2,000 online surveys with UK and USA consumers aged 18 and over.