Instagram Adds 50 Million Photos In August, Now Over 200 Million Total

Instagram is growing like crazy. In June, we noted when the service hit the 5 million user milestone, with 95 million photos uploaded. At the beginning of August, Instagram reached 150 million photos. And now the service has surpassed yet another milestone: 200 million photos.

Given that our last measurement was at the beginning of August, and the site is now well beyond 200M, that means that Instagram added some 50 million photos in August alone.

In keeping with our previous Flickr comparisons, that’s 200 million photos for the 10-month old Instagram, when it took Flickr almost 2 years to reach 100 million photos. Still, that’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, isn’t it? After all, Flickr reached its 100 millionth photo back in February 2006. The iPhone itself wasn’t unveiled until June 2007. And even then, it was nowhere near as ubiquitous a device as it is today.

And as we noted before, Flickr is now well past 5 billion photos, an increase that has also been impacted by the iPhone’s existence.

Still, 200 million photos is another nice milestone for Instagram to reach. And it’s impressive how quickly it got there.

By the way, if you’re curious how to keep track of Instagram’s numbers for yourself, Hans Kullin posted a hack on his blog, which involves using the third-party service Inkstagram. The URL’s found there are in sequential order. For example, this is the first ever published Instagram photo: http://inkstagram.com/#/photos/2. (Photo #1 is missing). This is the 150 millionth: http://inkstagram.com/#/photos/150000003, as previously confirmed. In that case, this would be the 200 millionth, but the photo is private, so, sadly, you can’t view it.

As for Instagram, it didn’t even notice the milestone until we pointed it out to them. They must be too busy working on their Android app over there.