iPhone poised to become most popular camera on Flickr?

It doesn't have an optical zoom, image stabilization, facial recognition, or even a flash, but the iPhone is duking it out with a high-end Canon Digital Rebel SLR for the most-popular camera on photo-sharing site Flickr.

The Los Angeles Times has been keeping an eye on this chart, which shows the percentage of Flickr users who've uploaded an image with a given make and model of camera—including cameraphones—over the past year. (Flickr is, of course, owned by Yahoo!.)

Over the past several months, the pricey, 10-megapixel Canon Digital Rebel XTi (a three-year-old SLR that's fetching more than $1,000 online) has been the most popular camera on Flickr, a site that (as the L.A. Times notes) is popular with professional shutterbugs looking to show off their latest and greatest snapshots.

But lately, the iPhone—which, until recently, sported a relatively lousy two-megapixel camera, with the new iPhone 3GS boasting an upgraded 3MP shooter with auto-focus—has been making inroads on the Flickr most-popular chart, and according to the L.A. Times, it briefly spiked on Monday, snagging the lead from the Canon SLR.

It looks like the engineers at Flickr have since tweaked their numbers, with the updated chart showing the iPhone back behind the Canon—but only by the thinnest of margins. Still, that doesn't change the fact that the iPhone and its middling (at best) camera, which lacks a flash on even the new 3GS model, may soon be the camera of "choice" among Flickr members.

Now as the L.A. Times story points out, the iPhone's numbers are "inflated" compared to other smartphones (such as the Nokia N95 and its stellar, 5MP camera) due to the fact that the metadata on iPhone-taken photos don't differentiate between the 2G, 3G, and 3GS models—meaning that as far as Flickr is concerned, all iPhone snapshots are lumped together into one big number.

That said, there's no denying the phenomenal sales figures for the new iPhone 3GS, and its modestly upgraded camera (not to mention the ease with which you can upload snapshots to Flickr on the iPhone via e-mail) has undoubtedly encouraged a lot more people to squeeze off and share their iPhone snapshots. Indeed, we've already seen reports that mobile video uploads to YouTube quadrupled in the days after the iPhone 3GS launch.

Of course, how you feel about this development all depends on how you feel about Flickr: should it be a haven for professionals and sharp-eyed amateur photographers to show off their portfolios and be inspired by the works of others, or should it be a YouTube-like free-for-all for the masses? (Of course, in the end it doesn't matter what you or I think; ultimately, it'll become whatever its users want it to be, for better or worse.)

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IPhone passes Canon Rebel XTi as most popular camera on Flickr [Los Angeles Times]