One-third of year's digital photos are on Facebook

1000memories

If one picture is worth a thousand words, then Facebook photos would be worth 140 quadrillion words, which is equal to 140 billion photos — more than a third of all digital photos taken in a year. 

Live Poll

Where is the primary place you upload and share your photos?

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  • 160378
    Facebook
    69%
  • 160379
    Photobucket
    6%
  • 160380
    Flickr
    3%
  • 160381
    Picasa
    18%
  • 160382
    Google+
    4%

VoteTotal Votes: 99

Answering the question, "How many photos have ever been taken?" —3.5 trillion photos — 1000memories went on to figure out how that number has risen steeply with the advent of the digital camera.

The site, which specializes in multimedia online memorials (and as a central sharing site for the living, too), estimated that 2.5 billion people around the world own digital cameras (also including phones that have built-in cameras). Then, if the average person snaps 150 photos this year that would total 375 billion photos.

Facebook's collection will be 140 billion by year's end, which makes the social network the reigning champion of memory keeping. (The volume of pictures, if it can be imagined, is kind of mind-blowing: "over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.")

Just this year, an estimated 70 billion to 100 billion photos will be uploaded to Facebook, which amounts to 20 percent of all photos taken in 2011. 

Facebook's 750 million members are certifiably crazy about photo-sharing. TechCrunch reported that at the start of 2011, more than 750 million photos were uploaded New Year's Eve weekend.

Way behind Facebook is Photobucket with 8 billion and Flickr, which recorded its 5 billion uploads as of a year ago.

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Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the Google+ stream.

Discuss this post

Wow, holy make up numbers day. Hey Athima, where are your sources? Name one legitimate source for these numbers that ISN'T a blog site. How do you extrapolate the grand total of pictures taken just by knowing how many have been uploaded to one single social networking site?

Articles like this are an insult to people who actually do research.

I love how 70bil - 100bil is 'going to be equal to 20%' even though it, in and of itself, shows a 30% fluctuation. I guess it's kinda hard to be wrong when your "ballpark" figure is the size of a county.

  • 1 vote
Reply#1 - Tue Sep 20, 2011 5:33 PM EDT
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