The first photo ever shared from a mobile phone was a picture of a newborn baby.

On June 11, 1997, Philippe Kahn created the world's first camera phone solution at the Sutter Maternity Center in Santa Cruz, California. While his wife was in labor, Kahn spent several hours wiring a Casio QV-10 digital camera to a Motorola StarTAC flip phone and a laptop. He wrote custom software on his laptop to automate the process of uploading the image to a web server he had set up at home.The system worked by using the phone's cellular connection to transmit the data. Once the photo of his daughter Sophie was uploaded, the server automatically sent email alerts with a link to the image to 2,000 family members, friends, and colleagues. This event is widely recognized as the birth of instant visual communication. Before this, digital photos had to be manually transferred to a computer via cables and then sent through a wired internet connection.Kahn's invention was not a single device but a 'point-and-shoot' infrastructure that he later refined into the company LightSurf. This technology eventually led to the development of the Sharp J-SH04, which was released in Japan in 2000 as the first integrated commercial camera phone. In 2016, Time Magazine included Kahn’s photo of Sophie in its list of the 100 most influential photographs of all time. The original setup used wires from his car's speaker system to complete the connection between the camera and the phone.