After nearly three months of intermittent posts, my mobile photography retrospective has finally come to an end. I began deliberately keeping my phone photographs in the year I graduated from university, just as smartphones were beginning to challenge Nokia’s dominance. The earlier photographs I took on Nokia and Motorola phones have been lost. There were not many of them, but I still regret losing them.

As cloud storage became widespread, I imported every phone photograph I had taken since 2013 into iCloud, whether it came from a Xiaomi or a Meizu. Whenever a photograph lacked location data and I could still remember where it had been taken, I added the GPS information myself. Early phone cameras had low resolution and limited image quality, but their files were small, so those photographs take up little space in iCloud. The library now holds close to 14,000 images taken with eight different phones.

Since I called the series My Mobile Photography Retrospective, the photographs still had to meet some basic standards. At a minimum, their composition, color, and subject matter had to be reasonably strong. Even by that fairly modest measure, surprisingly few images among the more than ten thousand made the cut. Many hold great personal significance for me but cannot really be called works of “photography.” After going back and forth through the collection, most of the photographs I chose came from the past five years, after I had begun to understand something about the medium.

The categories were never exact and were sometimes almost arbitrary. A single photograph might fit several themes, and where it ended up often depended on whether one of those themes already contained ten images. I deliberately limited each theme to ten photographs for two reasons: a large set quickly becomes tiring to read, and number emojis are available only for 0 through 10. What troubled me most, however, was the word limit in WeChat’s image-and-text layout. A thousand Chinese characters are nowhere near enough to introduce ten photographs with substantial stories. Every finished piece had to be revised again and again, with a great deal cut away. It was exhausting work. Yet it was also WeChat’s simpler image-and-text format that prompted me to dig out photographs buried at the bottom of my cloud storage, organize them and share them.

In many situations, a phone is an excellent tool for documentary photography. It is quick, convenient, and always close at hand, making it easy to capture unexpected moments. AI-powered search and location metadata also make it possible to find an image quickly and recall the circumstances from when and where it was taken. If a friend new to photography asked me what equipment to buy, I would say that a capable phone is enough.

For now, My Mobile Photography Retrospective has reached its end. The selection covers photographs taken up to December 2024. Perhaps I will return to the series once my phone library has gathered enough new material.

Thank you for looking. I hope you enjoyed it.

Appendix: The Complete Series

1. 2024-12-05: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 1
2. 2024-12-06: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 2: Rainy Days
3. 2024-12-07: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 3: Animals
4. 2024-12-08: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 4: Those Three Years—On the Road
5. 2024-12-09: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 5: Those Three Years—Testing
6. 2024-12-10: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 6: Those Three Years—Daily Life
7. 2024-12-11: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 7: Those Three Years—The End
8. 2024-12-12: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 8: Snowy Days
9. 2024-12-15: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 9: After Work
10. 2024-12-16: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 10: My Car
11. 2024-12-17: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 11: Myself
12. 2024-12-18: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 12: Passersby
13. 2024-12-19: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 13: The Ocean
14. 2024-12-21: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 14: Hangzhou’s Ten Districts
15. 2024-12-22: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 15: The Outskirts of Hangzhou
16. 2024-12-23: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 16: Around Hangzhou
17. 2025-01-03: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 17: Life Is Not Easy
18. 2025-01-03: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 18: Australian Landscapes
19. 2025-01-04: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 19: Life in Australia
20. 2025-01-06: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 20: Alibaba
21. 2025-01-10: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 21: Plants
22. 2025-01-13: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 22: Qinghai
23. 2025-01-18: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 23: The Mountains and Parks of Xining
24. 2025-01-21: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 24: Sydney, Australia
25. 2025-01-28: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 25: Sydney Landmarks
26. 2025-01-31: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 26: Happy Moments in China
27. 2025-02-03: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 27: Happy Moments Abroad
28. 2025-02-05: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 28: Interesting Photos
29. 2025-02-07: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 29: Urban China
30. 2025-02-10: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 30: Uncategorized Greater Sydney
31. 2025-02-15: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 31: Abstract, Interesting, and Atmospheric
32. 2025-02-19: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 32: Meaningful Photographs, Part 1
33. 2025-02-20: My Mobile Photography Retrospective — 33: Meaningful Photographs, Part 2