Open topic.

[Frank Fremerey]

I think the absolute number of good shots has increased, but it is not easy to find them in the ever growing pile of shots. I guess most of the shots are never looked at again after shooting

[Frank Fremerey]

Second thought: some people learn faster than others, so the faster feedback is useful for the talented, not so much for people like me who learn very slowly over decades an millions of shots

[Birna Rørslett]

The ratio good:mediocre never in history of photography has been as low as today, and it is still sinking. It's a number game as never has there been so many excellent shoots at display either. But the good ones drown in the ever-growing sea of bad shots.

[Bruno Schroder]

I would disagree with a broad notion of bad shots: most pictures taken are in fact good pictures, for their intended purpose...

78% of the world population is using a mobile phone (ITU numbers). Not all of them have a camera but photo sharing is now the most used communication media in the world. It 's not because everyone has a camera but because of the existence of an easy, cheap way to share pictures with a group you define yourself, instead of relying on the readership of a newspaper or the contact list of an art gallery. This availability of a cheap and easy to use sharing space for picture in your group has created new uses for pictures. The increase of photos taken is a byproduct of the sharing technology. I mean here Facebook, WhatsApp and the likes, not Flickr.

 Most picture are now taken for sharing with a limited group of people, for social connectivity or social cohesion purposes: showing children’s progress to distant relatives, documenting an area of concern, etc … A picture of a child riding a bicycle, a pothole or unlawful littering would not fit the selection criteria of an art gallery, but they are good pictures for their intended purposes and more valuable for the receiver than all “traditionally good” pictures.
Fundamentally, it is the number of photo categories that has changed and the number of different definitions of good or bad. There has never been so many.
There is a positive side for us, proponents of good photos in the traditional sense: photo literacy is expanding exponentially and with it the ability to appreciate photos from other categories. We are now still in the adoption phase of the media/technology. I would guess a further 10 years is needed to reach the “social integration” level where people would intuitively be able to read/appreciate most other photo categories.

[Thomas Stellwag]

I would disagree with a broad notion of bad shots: most pictures taken are in fact good pictures, for their intended purpose...

this is a important remark.

Pictures today are the way of communication, we understand anyone in the world, independant of his language.
Like we have differences of expressivness and ambition of literature, we have different kind of pictures. Our personal problem is, like already mentioned, to filter the ones, we want to see.
It is now the picture period of time, as the radio period was in the beginning of long wave times, you got everything together in mediocre quality

[Birna Rørslett]

We regard photography and the underlying reasons to conduct it differently. Thus conclusions are different as well. There is no conflict, just opposite views.

[Ilkka Nissilä]

Yeah, with digital, you can print the image again and again whenever the color is faded, so long as the data are compatible...

You don't even need to do that as inkjet prints made on pigment inks keep their color longer than most of us will live. This isn't the case with many lab C prints as we can see that there was considerable variability in how they kept over time and the ones made in my childhood are no longer what they were when new.

Of course, in addition to the prints keeping better, digital storage allows reprinting without decay assuming the digital files are copied from media to media to keep them accessible. However, I suspect most people will forget to backup their digital images (and cloud companies will do the same, and some of them will go bankrupt and lose the files) and probably few if anyone of the future generations will want to print the images left behind on hard drives by previous generations, even if they have the passwords which they probably won't have to access that content. The quantity of digital images means that those born in the future wiil probably not even try to gain access to these older images as it would be too much work.