iPhone 4 about to be most popular camera on Flickr

…And it's not even a camera.

As if you didn't need more proof that cell phones are killing the point-and-shoot market: the iPhone 4 is about to become the most popular camera used on Flickr.

Flickr's camera finder shows a graph of the most popular cameras in the Flickr community. The Nikon D90, a dSLR, is at the top of the charts (note: it's also at the top of PCWorld's charts), but the iPhone 4's popularity has been quickly rising -- and it looks like it may take over the Nikon D90 in the next month or so. Check it out:

According to Flickr, the graphs show the "number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one thing with a particular camera on a given day" over the past year. Also, the graphs are "normalized," which means Flickr takes into account new Flickr members: the graphs show how popular cameras are, relative to other cameras in the community.

Flickr also notes that smartphone data may actually be under-represented, because the graphs are based on Flickr's automatic recognition of the camera used to take each photo (and this is "not usually possible with cameraphones").

Flickr also shows popular point-and-shoot cameras, and how they're doing in regards to the rest of the Flickr community. And...it's not looking great. Canon has the market cornered with its PowerShot line, but everything seems to be going downhill:

This isn't the first time a cellphone will be more popular than a camera on Flickr -- in August 2009, the iPhone (all models) surpassed the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi as most popular Flickr camera.

Flickr also allows you to view graphs of different camera brands. Here's a look at the top 5 Apple cameras in the Flickr community (not surprisingly, the iPad 2 isn't doing all that well):

TechCrunch notes that Apple is actually the "least popular" of camera brands on Flickr, and wonders if this is because Apple only has four models (or if Flickr's data is wrong). I say, it's probably because Apple isn't a camera brand.

But it looks like Flickr users are proving me wrong!

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