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In December 2024 we retired the Stockimo app, but we’re still accepting Smartphone photos. You can read the latest update here. If you’re looking to upload your mobile phone photos to 17³Ô¹ÏÔÚÏß you can sign up here.

This blog article from 2020 has been kept live for archival purposes.

Explore a selection of lifestyle imagery shot on smartphones

Anyone remember when the first digital cameras came out? There was scepticism and a snobby attitude towards the new technology. It won’t be sharp enough. The resolution is too low. It’s just a gimmick. There’s no doubt that the images were low resolution to begin with and therefore not suitable for print. But it didn’t take long for the technology to catch up. Digital cameras were already outselling film cameras by 2003.

Nowadays, we’re fully aware of the speed that technology can progress at. This is best exemplified by the exceptional quality manufacturers can get out of their smartphone cameras. Quality that would have boggled our minds just ten years ago. And yet, there are still question marks about the quality of smartphone photos. Are they good enough?

Usage matters

It largely depends on where you plan to use your image. There’s no getting away from the fact that smartphone photos have a lower resolution to images shot on a professional, full-frame camera. But does that matter? For the vast majority of cases, no.

After all, most people are now used to viewing images on their phone. If you look closely, images on Instagram are highly compressed. The only reason they look good is because the size of the image is no bigger than a post-it note.

Let’s take an old smartphone, the iPhone 6. It has an 8-megapixel camera and its highest resolution (or actual size) is 3264×2448. Not bad for an old phone and certainly good enough for most digital applications.

Instagram displays its images with a maximum width of 1080 pixel so it’s plenty big enough for that. But how large can this go if printed? 29.26 cm by 19.50 cm at 300 dpi. About the size of A4 paper.

So unless you’re doing a big display ad, many smartphone photos are high enough resolution for your needs. And even then, people have used smartphone images for big billboards before, partly because they’re viewed from a distance but also because modern smartphone photos are high quality and high resolution.

Remember, this example is based on an old phone. The new iPhone 12 boasts an impressive 12 megapixels. Furthermore, there are a bunch of other benefits to using smartphone photography that is hard to replicate with more traditional stock photography.

If you’re not considering smartphone imagery, you might be missing out on millions of unique content that could be perfect for your project.

The future of photography

While it would be preferable to have larger sensors in our smartphone cameras for even better quality, that looks physically impossible even if phones do continue to grow in size. But we’re already seeing a megapixel explosion which we fully expect to continue. In 2019, the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 surprised many with its 108-megapixel camera!

Will they take over bulky DSLRs and mirrorless cameras? Unlikely in the near future, but given enough time, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see smartphone photography completely take over one day. It would be naïve to brush it off like we did with digital cameras in the 90s.

So are smartphone images good enough for you to use? For most use cases, yes, they are. There are some exceptions where you need incredibly high-resolution images but for digital applications and your average printing needs, smartphone photos should considered in your hunt for the perfect picture.

That’s why we have our app to help streamline the process of getting images from smartphones to the library so that you have access to imagery with a slightly different flavour to our traditional stock photo collection. Smartphones haven’t even been around for that long; imagine the image quality we’re going to get from them in ten years’ time!