5 Billion Photos on Flickr

Photo by yeoaaron

It was recently announced that the 5 billionth photos has been uploaded to Flickr. I am guessing this was the 5 billionth photo uploaded. I have no clue how to tell how many photos have been deleted. I have deleted a few.

There is part of me that thinks this is a bit of a setup. The photo is great. Just imagine if one of my crappy photos or a private photo was the magic number. They could not show people. The photo is also of Vancouver, the birth place of Flickr. I just have a funny feeling the number is honest, but they might have selected something interesting.

According to Number of.net there are 40 million flickr users. That would average 125 photos per user. There is no way how many active users there are. As of today I have 16126 photos uploaded and Kate has no photos uploaded. I would love to see a break down of how many people have 100 photos, 1000 photos, 10000 photos and 100000 photos. I know we will never see these numbers.

Media Culpa has a great entry about the growth of flickr. It shows the arch of the number of photos. My first photo is 33816 SEO has an some numbers about users and visits.

* Unique visitors 120M (estimated cookies)
* Unique visitors 56M (users)
* Reach 3.6%
* Page views 1.8B
* Total visits 230M
* Avg visits per visitor 4.2
* Avg time on site 7:20


I know that Facebook has a lot more photos on it then Flickr. They claim that 2.5 billion photos get uploaded to Facebook every month. The problem is that comparing Facebook to Flickr is comparing a Honda Accord to a Cadillac STS. They have a lot of the same features, but people choice what they are going to use for very different reasons. I am a big flickr user and I like the features flickr gives me. I think the photos on Facebook look very crappy.

Flickr might be my favorite web site of all time. Either Flickr or Blogger is the product that changed my life more then any other I have picked to use. I have meet people because of Flickr. I even proposed to my wife in a way that would make it easy to post on Flickr. Flickr has changed the way I see the world and see photography.

I am happy to see that flickr is not going away any time soon. I enjoy using it and I am not sure what I would do with my photography with out it.