Almost 1 billion photos uploaded to Facebook in one day!

Today, Facebook announced that over New Year, almost 1 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. At Pixable, we are really excited to continue hearing this type of news!

When we started thinking about Pixable, some people asked us why we were so focused on doing things with Facebook photos instead of Flickr, Picasa or Photobucket. At the time, Facebook had about 10 billion photos and Flickr, Picasa or Photobucket a little bit over 5 billion each. People told us that the size was similar, but Flickr had better quality photos. I always argued that except for some exceptions, the quality and interest of the photo is in who is in it, where it was taken, and your memory or experience associated to it. This is the focus of Facebook photos. Also, over time, Facebook has become the place to go to share photos and the numbers are astonishing. For example, Facebook, today has more than 55 billion photos with close to 4 billion photos uploaded per month (Flickr and Picasa are barely growing). That means, that every month, a new Flickr is created on Facebook (Flickr has needed 5 years to reach 5 billion photos!). In less than one year, there will be over 100 Billion photos on Facebook. Also, Facebook now allows you to upload high resolution photos and hopefully they will soon allow you to keep geotagging (where and when the photo was taken).

With smart phones, capturing, editing, tagging and sharing photos are not disjoint actions anymore. With the proliferation of smartphones, the growth of Facebook photos will be even more impressive in the following months. It seems that focusing on Facebook was the right choice.