"Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever,” said Aaron Siskand.

The respected US photographer, who died in 1991, had no inkling that many of the world’s pictures would never see the light of day. These days, billions of images are trapped on lost, stolen or broken smartphones. They are never printed into a 6x4-inch photograph to sit nestled in a wooden frame atop a mantlepiece.

Instead, thanks to the smartphone in your pocket, taking a photograph has become so commonplace it is easy to forget just how important capturing special moments once was.

Now Google, the world’s fourth biggest company with a market value of $840bn (£643bn), is banking on that obsession with taking and sharing photos to keep users hooked on its services.

Google’s parent Alphabet, which generated profits of $8.9bn in the last quarter alone, is a key beneficiary of our love of snapping with our smartphones. A growing chunk of its value is tied up in Google Photos – a low-profile but wildly popular service used by more than half a billion people every month. Each day, they use it to view more than 5bn photos and videos and back up more than 1.2bn more. To compare, Facebook had 2bn active monthly users in 2017.