That a camera phone could eclipse popular photographer mainstays like the Canon EOS Digital Rebel, Nikon's D-Series and others spoke highly of how much people value taking images on the go from a device that's always in their pockets.
Recently though, TheNextWeb noticed a dropoff in photos referencing the iPhone at Flickr. A commenter on TUAW then noticed what may actually be the culprit in the iPhone dip: Apple itself.
EXIF Data Change
As it turns out, with the new iPhone OS 3.1 update, Apple made a change to the EXIF data included in each photo taken with the iPhone camera. EXIF data is metadata about the image itself that's embedded in image file; it typically includes information about what type of camera took the photo, for example.
Still, iPhone OS 3.1 was only released 5 days ago in conjunction with the Apple Rock and Roll event, so it can't completely account for the dip that actually started back in mid-August -- but it certainly seems to be precipitating the continued drop.
If the theory is correct, there's also an easy solution Flickr could use to bring back a more accurate picture of the data. They would simply need to aggregate the three different models into a single line item on the graph, and/or perhaps offer some sort of way to view iPhone usage data as both separate models and as a total aggregate count together. We hope they choose the latter, as it would be interesting to see if people end up enjoying and using the 3-megapixel camera with autofocus in the 3GS moreso than the 2-megapixel version in the original and 3G iPhones.