Mobile Photography and AI
Daniel Stephen Vaughan Palmer · 2025
The phenomenal growth of mobile media over the past two decades has radically changed what we call photography. In a well-known development, ubiquitous networked cameras—and their ability to capture, display, edit and share images on the same screen—gave rise to new practices and platforms such as selfies and photo-centric social media. In addition, mobile media has underpinned new developments in computational photography. The camera lens and sensor may remain a selling point for phone manufacturers (the iPhone Pro now has three lenses), but more profound advances (such as “cinematic mode”) involve AI. Every stage of the photographic process is now entwined with computer algorithms, from enhanced capture modes to automatically “curate” memories and social media feeds. In this chapter I pay particular attention to how the computational photography embedded in mobile media shapes how we picture the world, from the ephemeral scanning of QR check-in codes to political and creative uses of the camera.