[znpy]

> There are only so many holiday pictures you can take, after all.

You miss the point, sadly.

Yeah storage is getting larger and cheaper but modern cameras/phones/etc take photos that are way larger than they used to do.

My first digital camera in like 2001 or so could only take either 20 "large" (640x480) bitmap photos or 80 "small" pictures, taking a few tens of kilobytes each at most.

My 2022 iphone se takes high quality pictures that are easily in the 7-8MB range (i just checked).

So yeah, disks keep getting larger, but so does the media.

[wongarsu]

And image sizes aren't really bound by human perception in any real way. Yes, screens typically range from 2-8MP, and probably won't go much beyond 32MP. But more resolution, more dynamic range, more color fidelity are incredibly useful for editing pictures; and you can always add resolution to add digital zoom.

Photos are however constrained by physics. There are only so many photons captured in a certain area in a given time, so no matter whether we talk about the tiny lenses and sensors of smartphones or the much larger versions on dedicated cameras there's a very real limit (and phones are pretty close to the limits imposed by their sensor size)