According to a recent blog post from 1000Memories, the company estimates that Facebook currently houses over 140 billion photos uploaded by users, a figure that’s 10,000 times larger than all the photos housed by the Library of Congress. Based off a figure from a Facebook engineer earlier this year, the social network oversees more than 200 million photos uploaded per day, approximately 6 billion per month. Techcrunch also reported that Facebook users uploaded an estimated 750 million photos over the New Year’s holiday earlier this year. 1000 Memories estimates that the typical digital camera owner takes about 150 digital images per year and potentially uploads 20 percent of all pictures to Facebook over the course of a year.
1000Memories went onto calculate that over 3.5 trillion photos, analog and digital, have been captured since the invention of the camera. The company estimates that 376 billion digital photos will be captured in 2011 as well as four billion analog photos in that same time period. The frequency of taking photos has increased by a factor of four over the last ten years as well. 1000Memories estimates that it currently takes two minutes for people to collectively snap the same amount of photos that were captured during the nineteenth century and 10 percent of those 3.5 trillion photos were taken in the last 12 months. Analog photography hit its peak in the year 2000 when 85 billion physical photos were captured, a figure that translates to 2,500 photos per second.
Funded by Y Combinator, 1000Memories is a photography-related service that allows users to digitize old scrapbooks and photo albums. Basically a combination of Ancestry.com and Flickr, users can document family trees with digital photos as well as share the pages with family and friends. Users can also setup pages for deceased relatives to chronicle their lives through old analog photos scanned into the service.
