Three years in and my photos still look like snapshots, what changed for you and roughly when

Print twenty of your favourites at a decent size and pin them on a wall for a month. Snapshots collapse in print and you will see exactly which ones they are.

Mine was going out and shooting the same corner of the same street at six different times of day for a fortnight. Nothing about my technique changed and the pictures got dramatically better, because I finally stopped thinking about the subject and started seeing where the light was coming from and what it was doing to the surface. That was somewhere in year two and it is the only thing I would call a step change rather than a slope.

For a year I shot around a hundred frames a week and, more importantly, edited every week down to five and wrote one line about why each survived. The shooting taught me very little. The cutting taught me almost everything, because you cannot cut to five without articulating what you are actually interested in.

I disagree that volume is the lever, at least at your stage. What fixed it for me was committing to a series of twenty images on one narrow idea and refusing to include anything that did not belong. Individually fine but forgettable is exactly what happens when every frame is its own unrelated decision, and a project forces you to have a position and then to defend it against your own nice photos.

I lost two years to gear, and I want to be specific about the cost rather than just say gear does not matter. Three bodies and six lenses in twenty four months, and every one of those purchases came with two or three weeks of shooting test subjects to justify it. That is easily six months of weekends spent photographing nothing I cared about.

One practical thing nobody mentions: get critique from people who do not know you and are not photographers. Photographers tell you about focus and composition, everyone else tells you whether the picture is about anything, which is the actual gap you are describing.