Infographic: iPhone photo sizes 2008-current. Click to enlarge.
Updated 2/21/23
Size matters. Especially in iPhoneography. Here’s Life In LoFi’s infographic showing the relative sizes of all iPhone photo sizes, from the original iPhone 2G to the latest iPhones, the 14 series and iPhone 14 Pro Max. If you’re still shooting with an old iPhone, this chart may give you pixel envy.
Since the iPhone 8, a gorgeous 12 megapixel iPhone camera has been the norm. With most social media sites reducing images down to a couple thousand pixels per side, that’s still 4 times as many pixels as you need (that’s how the math works out…)
We’re constantly exposed to the numbers of image resolution, but the difference between image sizes can be difficult to visualize. So a while back, I thought it would be interesting to see how the image sizes looked visually when compared to each other. I created the original graphic with the image sizes from all of the iPhone cameras at the time — iPhone 2G, 3G and 3GS.
The latest, top of the line iPhone 14 Pro Max have a 48 megapixel sensor — that’s a resolution of 8064 x 6048 pixels. That’s 4X the resolution of an iPhone 13. That’s a lot of pixels to tuck into such a small camera.
This update includes the 12MP camera of the latest iPhones. As you can see, 6 times bigger than the original iPhones looks very different visually. By the way, even the original iPhone’s 2MP images can enlarge for prints quite nicely. See how big iPhone photo enlargements can print here. Online photo sharing such as Facebook and Instagram are supporting larger file sizes as well.
The original iPad has a rear-camera resolution of 960×720 pixels, which is not shown here due to crowding down at the low end. The original iPod Touch devices have the same rear camera resolution.
There are still new and some popular apps that max out at well below even the 2 MP of the original iPhone 2G. When you see visually how small that really is, it emphasizes the importance of image size and number of pixels and why it’s important for photo apps to support the full resolution of the device, or at least high resolution.
Hopefully the low-res apps will get updated or just fade away. Even when the iPhone cameras were only 2 MP, 800×600 and 1024×768 resolution — both less than 1 megapixel — were just barely acceptable. With a standard resolution of at least 12 MP, unless you’re trying to create a true digital lo-fi look or if you only share your photos on Facebook or Instagram, there is almost no reason any more to be constrained to this ever-shrinking canvas.
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