Facebook is trying to bring the world’s poor online (and onto its platform) with Internet.org, but as a report on the foundation’s progress confirms, it’s already a staggeringly large presence for the rest of us. In a white paper about making pages and apps more efficient, Facebook used its photo volume as a case study, revealing some big numbers. Every day, Facebook’s 1.15 billion user base uploads an average of 350 million photos, adding up to a total of 250 billion photos uploaded since the site’s launch.
Facebook users have uploaded a quarter-trillion photos since the site’s launch
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
Photos themselves are a relatively small part of the picture. Facebook says that 4.75 billion total pieces of content — a category encompassing photos, comments, and status updates — are posted every day; 4.5 billion “Likes” and 10 billion messages are sent over the same period. Even so, the numbers dwarf other sites. Facebook subsidiary Instagram says it averages 55 million photo uploads a day, with a total of 16 billion photos. And Flickr sees only 3.5 million photos added daily with 8 billion added in total, though it’s geared towards a somewhat different crowd than Facebook or Instagram lifeloggers.
Facebook has previously cited the 350 million daily number, but its photo library has grown slightly from February, when it reported a total of 240 billion images. And all those uploads come at a major data cost: its total infrastructure contains 250 petabytes of data.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
