The best camera may be the one you have with you, but the best photo is the one that stays with its observer. And the impact a photo will make depends very much on the camera, the lens and your eye, among other variables.
For example, a simple compact might help you catch a spontaneous moment with friends, but you wouldn’t use it to snap a Formula One car in motion. The speed and burst rate of a high-end DSLR with a telephoto lens can deliver striking sports images, but whip one out at a party, and those spontaneous moments are likely to evaporate altogether.
Meanwhile, for studio work, your choice of camera may be far more personal: the format that you know and love and which complements your subject most aptly.
While the art of photography is far from an exact science, data is available to help choose a camera that is proven to deliver inspiring images. So, with so many traditional, digital and phone cameras to choose from, we analyzed which brands and models most consistently get “faved” on Flickr, overall and for each of the most common genres of photography.
What We Did
Electronics Hub collected camera model data on 1,161,339 photos posted on Flickr across the following tags: “architecture,” “portrait,” “landscape,” “fashion,” “wildlife” and “food.” Then, we calculated the average number of favorites per photo for each camera brand and camera/camera phone model overall and for each tag, allowing us to rank the “most loved.”
KEY FINDINGS
- The camera brand that produces the most loved photos is Olympus, with snaps from this make earning an average of 26.6 faves on Flickr.
- The camera model that harvests the most faves on Flickr is the Canon EOS M6 Mark II, averaging 138.9 faves.
- The phone camera that produces the most loved photos is the Apple iPhone 13 Pro, averaging 29.8 faves on Flickr.
- The camera model that produces the most loved photos for any particular type is the Fujifilm X30, which wins an average of 438.1 faves for photos of architecture.
The Cameras That Produce the Most Loved Photos
First, we looked at the cameras and phones that produce the most loved photos overall. We found that for some popular brands, the model makes all the difference. For example, shoot with any old Canon, and you’re likely to get around 16.6 faves on Flickr — making it only the seventh top brand. But shooting with a Canon EOS M6 Mark II delivers 138.9 faves on average, the top for any specific model.
Olympus’s work gets more faves on Flickr than any other camera brand. Takeshi Yamashita founded the company known as Olympus in 1919, first using its now-famous brand name for one of its microscopes in the 1920s. In the early years, Olympus focused on medical lenses, only developing cameras in the 1930s.
It wasn’t until the 1950s, on hiring a hot-shot photographer-inventor called Yoshihisa Maitani, that the company became a serious contender. For decades, Olympus was known for its innovative, high-quality and stylish cameras, and it is Olympus’s century-long expertise in lenses and its user-oriented technical breakthroughs that continue to deliver lovable photos.
The most sure-fire Olympus camera, across purposes, is the E-M5. This digital take on Olympus’s classic range of 35mm SLRs is “a small, well-built camera designed for enthusiasts,” according to Digital Photography Review, who named it one of the 20 most significant cameras of the 2010s.
But the model that produces the most loved shots of any brand is the Canon EOS M6 Mark II, which garners an average of 138.9 faves on Flickr. The “big benefit over the original M6 is less in image quality (although that extra resolution is handy for cropping), but in the variety of images you can take,” writes one reviewer, noting that the “boost to the burst shooting means the M6 Mark II is a potentially handy camera to have on hand in demanding action scenes” and “certainly boosts your chances of getting a shot.”
Crucially, this Canon is also noted for its JPEG compression so that even smaller files look great posted online.
A few years ago, if you’d told a top photographer that professional-grade photos could be made using camera phones and not look out of place on a serious image-sharing website, they’d probably ask, “What’s a camera phone?” and maybe even, “what’s a website?” But as the buzz over the iPhone 15 shows, today’s photographers may embrace phone photography without looking back (as long as they have the appropriate supporting peripherals).
Apple’s iPhone 13 Pro stands out as the phone that takes the most lovable photos. With a larger sensor and faster aperture than older models, the 13 Pro captures a pleasing level of detail and exposure range; the camera’s optical zoom delivers strong long-range shots, a rarity among phone cameras.
The Top Camera Models by Type of Photography
The cameras above may be the best choice “all-rounders” for producing photos that people love, but for more serious or specialized photographers, a more precise toolkit can have a more profound effect. In fact, we found that pairing the right camera with the right subject can garner many times more faves than that camera’s average overall.
Here are the cameras that take the top-rated pictures across photography’s most popular categories.
Landscapes: Sony A6300 Best in Field
Sony only comes out on top for one category. Landscape photography comes with its own set of challenges — lack of control over lighting conditions, the scale of depth and range and awkward range of exposure variations, to name a few — and the Sony Alpha a6300 rises to them, delivering an average of 294.9 faves per landscape snap. This is a powerful camera for its small size, making it a nimble choice for working in the field (or in a field).
Wildlife: Olympus E-M10 Keeps Your Profile Low and Your Faves High
The Olympus E-M10 Mark II is head and (furry) shoulders above the competition when shooting wildlife. Wildlife photography requires discretion, quick reactions, and slow movements — a tricky combo catered to by the E-M10’s settings and shortcuts.
The E-M10 is a decent camera that amateurs can quickly learn, making it more likely that an opportune shot of a butterfly or a pensive bear will be a winner. And the camera flourishes even when tracking beasties in a much colder climate.
Architecture: Monumental Shots with Fujifilm X30
The highest camera-genre partnership in our study is the use of a Fujifilm X30 to photograph architecture. While snapping buildings and spaces may seem the simplest of pursuits, this apparent simplicity is precisely why creating something memorable takes a special touch. More than most other categories, your first tool with architecture photography is your eye: finding your own way to “see” a structure and to embrace the environmental conditions on location.
As “the next step for compact power,” the Fujifilm X30 does not have all the bells and whistles of a higher-end camera. However, its size and versatility make it a great companion on a city walk — allowing you to make the most of those bursts of chance or inspiration.
Food: Nikon D500 and D7500 Good Enough to Eat
Food photography is either a modern phenomenon or a bugbear of digital-era life, depending on your taste (and perhaps what platform you’re on). Everybody eats, and most of us have a camera in our pocket, so capturing the raw excitement of cooked food to share with the world is a common impulse.
However, the serious photographer should always consider where the photo will end up — Instagram, professional website, album, or gallery — before even choosing their tools. The “sharpness and image quality” of the Nikon D500 makes it pop for food photography on Flickr, while its smaller, simpler cousin, the D7500, is the second loveliest choice. Just remember to ask for a window seat…
Fashion: Fujifilm GFX100S Pairs Creative Instinct with a Dashing Cut
“The beauty of fashion photography is that it comes from people being themselves,” says photographer Flo Ngala — and this applies both to the models and, brief permitting, the snapper. The medium-format Fujifilm GFX100Sanswers this call with “two rotation knobs that fully let you dial in your shutter speed and aperture (or ISO) without having to rotate any other dials,” allowing the photographer to work instinctively and respond to the model and the scene as it unfolds.
Plus, the camera’s 102 megapixels allow you to photograph wide, retaining the privilege to crop (or have your fashion editor crop) and juxtapose your pictures for the final spread. With an average of 84.6 faves per fashion photo, the GFX100S produces the most popular photos on Flickr for this genre.
Portraits: Nikon Z 7II and Canon EOS 6D Battle for the Spotlight
Portraiture is a delicate art that can produce decidedly “meh” results if the photographer is not attuned to the light conditions and aware of the effects of different aperture and shutter speed settings. Further, the portraitist needs to consider their client’s preferences and will likely have their own artistic impulses to satisfy.
We found that the ten cameras that most reliably produce lovable results are made by Nikon or Canon. According to a portrait photographer who made the switch from Canon to Nikon, “[p]eople that shoot film and digital or like more of a light and airy look tend to be Canon shooters and shooters that have a moodier feel or had more vibrant/contrasty colors tend to be Nikon users.” Canon is the physically sturdier choice, but Nikon may offer better results in the low light of a wedding shoot.
Choose the Camera that Chooses You
Developments in camera technology have been fast and furious over the past quarter-century, with digital photography, camera phones and increasing levels of on-board AI technology changing the game.
But photography trends are also cyclical. Analog photography orbits in and out of fashion among casual photographers and hobbyists, and even the distinctly “transitional” cameras of the early digital age are making a comeback despite their shortcomings. This goes to show that the camera that will produce the most loved photos needn’t be the most expensive, nor “the one you have with you,” but perhaps, instead, the camera you love the most.
Methodology
To create these tables, we collected data on 1,161,339 photos posted on Flickr with their camera information across the following tags: “architecture,” “portrait,” “landscape,” “fashion,” “wildlife” and “food.” Then, we filtered the photos with no “favorites’” from other users to remove unpopular and irrelevant photos.
For the overall dataset and for each category, we then calculated the average number of favorites per photo for each camera brand and camera/camera phone model, allowing us to rank the “most loved.”’
We omitted camera phones released before 2000 for the camera phone models ranking. The analysis of this data is correct as of October 2023.
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