In the era of digital imaging, the art of photography has undergone profound changes, in which the calculation method of temporal art and symbolic space has become the key to understanding this art form. This paper analyzes the temporal form of photographic art and designs the symbolic space in photographic art, using digital photography technology based on drone remote sensing combined with collage photography technology. And through a variety of calculation methods, the time consciousness and symbolic space of the creative works are quantitatively embodied. The resolution of the photographic works obtained by scanning drone photography and surround photography is 9.448 and 9.966mm respectively, and the error in plane and height is low. The use of collage technology to express different emotions is demonstrated by the audience’s recognition score of more than 4. Digital technology embodies the time consciousness and symbolic space of photography, “storytelling”, “composition and perspective”, “light and color”, with an average increase of 16.9%, 20.36%, and 13.06% respectively. The regression results show that “image capture and processing”, “post-processing”, “high resolution and color reproduction”, “autofocus”, “Digital Signal Processing” can all contribute to the time-conscious and symbolic spatial embodiment of photographic art at the 0.001 level.