ZDNet summarize a Tabblo survey which foundthat 11 percent of U.S. respondents said they had more than 10,000 digital photos. Breaking down all the groups, the survey estimates that Americans have about 500 billion digital photographs stored on their hard drives and memory cards.
That is an enormous estimate which highlights just how much digital cameras have changed photography. Digital photography really started taking off in 2000 (as of 1999 there were only an estimated 8 million digital cameras worldwide compared to 200 million film cameras in the United States alone). If we assume that the bulk of those 500 billion digital photographs were taken from 2000-2007, that would be about 71 billion photos each year. According to this estimate of worldwide information production in 1999 there were 82 billion photographs taken worldwide.
A lot of commentators typically complain that these sort of statistics are indicative of an information glut where far more photographs are being produced than could possibly be viewed (and besides, who really needs more pictures of someone’s cat?) But Flickr’s February cache problems illustrate just how voracious our appetite for photographs are.
According to the Flickr blog, the site regularly serves up hundreds of millions of photographs and, on the busiest days, tops 1 billion photographs per day. Flickr doesn’t say how many different photographs are stored on the service but does mention that it uses “hundreds of terabytes of storage.” That’s a crapload of photographs on just a single website.