When something is hard, we don’t do it much. When something’s easy, we do it much more. The question many social observers are asking is: How much is too much?

Not very long ago, taking pictures was hard. You’d spend several dollars on a roll of film which had to be hand-loaded into a cumbersome 35mm camera that you wore slung about your neck in the manner of a medieval penitent. When you’d burned through your scant 24 frames, you removed the film and drove it to the drug store, which made you wait days before charging you several more dollars to find out you had two dozen over-exposed photographs of your thumb. Okay, it wasn’t the trials of Job, but it was inconvenient enough, and expensive enough, that most folks gave a thought before tripping the shutter.

Amateur photography got a lot easier in the late 1990s as affordable digital cameras started pouring onto the market and unfocused pictures of thumbs started flooding the Internet. Point, shoot, download and post. And that lavish feast of cheap, easy and instantaneous imagery is increasing exponentially as the rise of the camera-phone gives a new species of over-sharer the ability to showcase their every mundane daily experience on a global stage. Hip cultural taxonomers have dubbed this pernicious creature the “phoneographer”, and evidence of its curious habits is piling up like guano in the Big Room at Carlsbad Caverns.

According to industry number-crunchers, about 30,000 photographs are uploaded to Instagram every 60 seconds, which sounds like a lot until you consider the 240,000 photos (and about 100 hours of bandwidth-hungry HD video) that get posted on Facebook during the same minute. Add to that the relentless tide of off-center coffee-foam art, blurry windshield snaps and look-alike pet photos drowning the servers of photo-sharing sites like Flickr, Shutterfly and SmugMug with every tick of the clock and one begins to appreciate just how much there is to look at. Experts expect that about one trillion digital photographs will be taken in 2016, and that almost 80 percent of them will be taken with a camera phone.

It’s an irresistible temptation for statistically-engaged persons to contrive dramatic, if unlikely, real-world comparisons by which they can communicate the wonder they find in dry numbers with those of more representational turn of mind. A favorite device is the hypothetical laying of things end to end, in which scenario those trillion snaps, rendered as 4 x 6-inch prints and arranged in linear fashion, would stretch more than 200 million miles. Another popular gimmick is expressing numerical information in astronomical terms, by which we learn that 200 million miles is more than twice the distance between the earth and the sun.

While only a fortunate few of those phoneographed wrought-iron lamp posts, dew-beaded daisies and Thanksgiving table-shots will ever find a mass audience, they all have to be kept somewhere. At the moment there are something like 3 trillion digital photographs in cyber-storage, and with the pace of phoneography increasing at a shade over 16 percent annually, the trove of trivial tableaus should break the 5 trillion mark sometime before the last drunken photo-bomb of New Year’s Eve, 2017.

And what’s wrong with that? Ones and zeroes are non-perishable and easy to pack, and folks who want to photographically commemorate their every encounter from sun-up to lights-out are certainly within their rights to do so. Still, some contend that the unrestrained spread of phoneography is choking out more beneficial strains of expression, and possibly even stifling the flower of human creativity.

Topping the list of the aggrieved are professional photographers. Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian quotes award-winning Mexican photographer Antonio Olmos thusly: “It’s really weird. Photography has never been so popular, but it’s getting destroyed. There have never been so many photographs taken, but photography is dying.”

Granted, there’ll likely always be an honorable place for the righteous photograph, the well-composed plate, the artful union of life and lens. But with an inexhaustible reservoir of dirt-cheap images on sites like Photobucket and 123rf at their fingertips, more and more individuals and publishers are satisfied to make do with the marginal amateur snap they can get for a song rather than purchasing the real deal at market price. If earning a living wage with a camera has never been easy, it’s fast becoming impossible.

Other digital critics are more concerned about the high sentimental price that cheap pictures can exact from the free-clicking phoneographer, a phenomenon psychologists have recently identified as the “photo-taking impairment effect.” Simply put, when we take a picture of something, we are less likely to remember it, and the more pictures we take the fewer memories we’ll have backing them up on our mental hard drives.

“When people rely on technology to remember for them,” psychologist Linda Henkel of Fairfield University in Connecticut tells The Guardian, “counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves, it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences.”

That’s a real shame, because at some point – probably sooner rather than later – your friends will get tired of looking at the pictures of your dream-trip to Paris and you’ll put them away and all you’ll have left are the snapshots of your own distracted recollection, grainy and indistinct because you saw most of the Eternal City on a 3 x 5-inch screen.

“People taking photographs of their food in a restaurant instead of eating it,” Olmos laments. “People taking photographs of the Mona Lisa instead of looking at it. I think the iPhone is taking people away from their experiences.”

And just possibly robbing whatever dilute experiences remain of consequence. Lucinda Rosenfeld wrote all about it for the New York Times in a column titled “Many More Images, Much Less Meaning”

“With effort and cost excised from the equation, photos have become too plentiful,” contends Rosenfeld. “As more and more pictures are taken on smartphones, ‘shared’ on social media if at all, then lost to the cacophony of the digital universe, meaningful images have become too scarce. I can’t help wondering whether — with every digital image we casually take and delete from our iPhones or Androids — we’re stripping photography of its awesome powers to keep the past in our sights.”

Heavy stuff, but likely moot. The seductive genie of phoneography is out of the bottle and we’d best learn to live with it. Fact is, any number of pictures is probably too many if it obscures our view of genuine artistry, or dims cherished memory, or clouds meaningful experience. Perhaps the best way to defend ourselves against the digital onslaught is the simple way. The old way. The 35mm way.

Ask yourself:

Is this pic really necessary?