• Facebook hits 10,000,000,000 photos, good LORD

    Devin Coldewey

    Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. → Learn More

    Wednesday, October 15th, 2008


    Doug Beaver over at a Facebook Engineering blog casually mentions that they have just had their ten billionth photo uploaded. Not only that, but since they keep 4 copies of each in different sizes, that’s 40 billion files just for the photos. Then he drops these little nuggets:

    • 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day
    • They have just over one petabyte of photo storage
    • They serve over 15 billion photo images per day
    • Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

    Kind of puts things into perspective, right? I remember I was pumped when I got my 100,000th visitor to my mp3 blog, Robosexual. A year of my own traffic, tripled in a single second by Facebook. Nick at Roughtype notes,

    “I did a quick scan of the 10 billion photos and found that 3 billion of them included an image of beer, in keg, can, bottle, or pitcher form, 1.5 billion included an image of a bra, and 675 million included both beer and a bra.”

    I’m… I’m just so proud!

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