Technology

An ‘irreversible multiplication of pixels’ in photo industry calls for sharper compression

There will be 1.2 trillion photos taken this year as predicted by market research consulting firm InfoTrends and 85% of these will be taken on a mobile phone.

With this many photos accumulating, numbers are expected to reach 4.7 trillion photos in storage. On Facebook alone, users upload more than 350 million photos daily as people are increasingly sharing photos on social media platforms.

As more photos are captured on mobile phones, there are more improved camera technologies that enable high resolution photos. However, many apps create larger files and quickly eat up the limited storage space.

According to Hongkiat, photo capturing is one of the main culprits for taking up the space on a mobile phone. The latest phones, such as the Apple iPhone 7 come with a minimum of 32GB of storage. Even so, people who enjoy taking photos, “Instagramming” and sending images to friends, can quickly consume this space.

In the business world and social circles, consumers like quality photos that can be quickly be shared without wasting money on additional storage space.

According to digital imaging specialists Xsight Technologies, “The imaging industry is experiencing an irreversible multiplication of pixels both for camera sensors and displays.”

As photos are projected to be snapped at a 9% increase over last year, maintaining quality while compressing and reducing image sizes is no longer a need for professionals, but for amateur photographers as well.

“Every existing sharpening solution is either manual and/or introduces major defects into the processed photos,” according to Xsight, who recently announced the launch of their new photo enhancing app, Magic Picture on iOS in collaboration with development studio Fueled.

As existing solutions are universally flawed, requiring user knowledge, equipment and time, the free app allows users to create high definition, sharp photos with reduced file sizes, using less storage space on iPhone devices.

Jacinta Spies

Jacinta Spies is a Journalism and International Relations student at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. She currently enjoys writing about technology as she travels throughout South America, immersing herself in the culture.

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  • This is exactly the reason why the demand of cloud services are increasing day by day. And now it is finding its applications in smartphones as well. Latest example would be Google Pixel 2 which boasts of unlimited storage making use of google's cloud services. And slowly it will be coming in every new device because of improving imaging in smartphones and more requirement of space in phones.

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