I wanna be a photographer but dude i need more mega pixels, What are megapixels?

"Megapixel" does it not sound a bit exaggerated.

The iphone 7 has a 12 megapixel camera so does Samsung's galaxy s8 , we all look at the specs and pick the one phone with the most megapixels and this is something that manufactures are very much aware and try to use it as much as possible .
A few lost souls have been googling this

So what exactly are megapixels?

Pixel ( on a completely related story pixel happens to be an android phone which is sold and marketed by google but that’s not the kinda pixel we are interested in) is the smallest unit of information that makes up a picture kinda like atoms but mostly square and for pictures .

If you zoom on a picture till it starts getting blurry and you start seeing boxes, those boxes are the pixels and mega is just another way of saying one million, like one million bytes = 1 megabyte ,one million watts = 1 megawatt , so naturally 1 million pixels would be one megapixel !.

Megapixel is just a unit of graphic resolution equivalent to one million pixels therefore the total no of pixels in an image taken with an Iphone 7 at full resolution should be somewhere around 12 million, the pixels are typically arranged in 2 dimensional grid (like 1200x1300).

More pixels more details?

Yes absolutely !

The more pixels a picture has the more detailed it will, consider the following image

You can see it’s not possible to display R with a resolution of 2x2 we add a few more pixels and soon enough the image starts getting more detailed with each additional pixel. We need only 100x100 to display the letter R! , Since most smartphone have millions of pixels ,most smartphones have a good "enough" cameras pixel wise of course.

More pixels Better Pictures?

Yes and No

It is true like the R example
And no , other factors that come into play like e.g (Light ,Sharpness of an image can be affected by shaking,Lens flare)

Cameras are everywhere ,we all have access to pretty powerful devices and under the right circumstances one can capture magnificent and beautiful moments

A friend of mine took a picture with a pretty high end camera and was quite disappointed when the picture came out not looking like Beyoncé the disappointment I could see in her eyes led me to research this.

thank you for reading have a blessed day