Yahoo, meanwhile, swooped in on Flickr -- the service that has transformed photography into a popular social pursuit.

CNN: 15 years of the World Wide Web

But while still a popular destination, particularly for serious photography enthusiasts, it has lost more casual users to the likes of Facebook.

BBC: Twitter icon, smartphone

But long before Weegee (whose real name was Arthur Fellig) pandered to popular prejudices about the differentness of criminals, photography was used by criminologists influenced by crude Darwinian ideas about race, heredity and criminality to try to confirm their assumption that villains were somehow physically distinguishable from law-abiding citizens.

ECONOMIST: Most-wanted photography

When I gave a TEDGlobal talk on femto photography in June, I began with a reference to Doc Edgerton, a very popular MIT professor of electrical engineering who, in 1964, wowed the world with an image of a bullet in midair, having just passed through an apple.

CNN: A camera that can see around corners