Facebook Photo Library Dwarfs Everything Else In The Planet

Check out the gigantic volume of photos now stored in Facebook compared to Flickr, the Library of Congress and Instagram. I knew they were big, but I never imagined the difference could be so huge. 140 billion photos! It defies belief.

It’s 10,000 times larger than the photo catalogue in the Library of Congress.

Digital cameras are now ubiquitous — it is estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have a digital camera. If the average person snaps 150 photos this year that would be a staggering 375 billion photos. That might sound implausible but this year people will upload over 70 billion photos to Facebook, suggesting around 20% of all photos this year will end up there. Already Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.

According to 1000memories, so far humanity has taken 3.5 trillion. Right now, “every two minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took in the 1800s.”

Maybe someday someone would do something incredibly useful with them, like monitoring the state of mind of the whole planet by analysing the expressions and landscapes of all these photos.

It’s sad to see the demise of analogue photos — and surprising that there were still four billion taken in the last year alone. [1000memories]