Facebook hits 10 billion photos

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Facebook has revealed that it has hit a huge milestone, 10 billion photos are stored on the site.

Doug Beaver, a Facebook engineer, revealed the statistic yesterday evening on the companys blog. Perhaps more impressive is that 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day. The company has just over one petabyte of photo storage and serves 15 billion photo images per day.

Beaver also revealed "To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups. One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon."

A year ago Facebook was serving 3 billion photos a day, had 160 terabyes of storage for photos and 60 million photos were being uploaded each week. The company believes the photo application is one of the most popular areas of the site.

According to Cnet, rivals Photobucket and Flickr stand at 6.2 and 2 billion respectively.

In reality, Facebook stores four image sizes for each uploaded photo, so that’s over 40 billion files stored altogether.

#1 Brodel on 15 Oct 2008 - 19:23

Facebook serves 15 billion photo images per day. That's crazy, I wonder how many sites like imageshack or flickr serve.

#2 +stifler6478 on 15 Oct 2008 - 19:26

That's insane. Kudos to facebook.

-Spenser

#3 Lee® on 15 Oct 2008 - 19:48

Ridiculous amount of photos per day.

(1 reply) #4 digitalsoft on 15 Oct 2008 - 19:59

Woah! Am i reading that right, more than flickr? Thats insane.

#4.1 rm20010 on 16 Oct 2008 - 05:23

digitalsoft said,

Difference being on Flickr you won't find pictures of people in their beds doing... nothing.

#5 duntkno on 15 Oct 2008 - 19:59

wow... 10 billion... you gotta have alot of storage for that..

#6 Poolius on 15 Oct 2008 - 20:09

Yes, a petabyte - it says so in the poorly written article.

#7 DrIndianaJones on 15 Oct 2008 - 20:39

That explains the frequent times that pictures refuse to load. Think of the sheer number requests that the image servers must have to handle!

#8 Stormeh on 16 Oct 2008 - 02:24

Pretty much crazy, in a few years every corner of my life will probably be available on FB

#9 vipwoody on 16 Oct 2008 - 03:17

amazing.... what about the future?

they will buy crop lands to build storage buildings

(1 reply) #10 jaspinall on 16 Oct 2008 - 08:22

Hold on a god damned cotton picking minute.... you cannot possibly compare Facebook's ability to store/retrieve photos with other "proper" photo hosting sites. For starters, Facebook's crappy Java uploader completely knackers your images as they upload, the quality is horrendous!! I purposely resize my photos specifically for Facebook and each and every one look crap when uploaded, compared to the original when viewed side by side.

Yes, Facebook may have 10B online...but at a price! Gimme Flickr any day of the week!

#10.1 Cpugeni Ω on 16 Oct 2008 - 09:33

Flickr and Facebook cant really be compared, they are different types of websites aimed at different people.

Flickr stores FULL resolution photos, some of which are up to 20MB in size, these are photos fit for photo print, where as Facebook photos probably rarely even exceed 500kb.

The company believes the photo application is one of the most popular areas of the site.

lol, really?! I hadnt actually noticed that.

#11 Magallanes on 16 Oct 2008 - 14:19

????
110 million user.
10 billion photo = 10'000 million photos (flickr is around 3 billion, nothing strange considering flickr is the *most* popular site to store and publish your photos).
So in facebook an average user store 90 photos (its a lot of photo per user)
Is it that true? or is facebook over inflating their statistic?

IMHO sound like BS, many facebook profiles are with little or no information.

#12 Poolius on 16 Oct 2008 - 17:09

I have lots of friends who have literally thousands of photos, so to me 90 average doesn't sound too outlandish. All of your profile pictures will be included in the statistic as it uses the photo application.

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