is facebook's photo portion really the biggest, or simply the most connected (aggregation of other services/photos)? - thecolor
Can't open the Link. Just main interface... - Ansgar Wollnik
Holy Cow....it is bigger than flikr.....scarry - Matt Rider
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540 terabytes doesn't seem all that big. - Louis Gray
It may be bigger than flickr but the pictures are actually used on flickr rather than being locked up to a profile and a few hundred friends. - Rahul Das
it's a lot, especially considering they downsample images. i.e. your 1.2mb jpg gets reduced to 128kb on FB. The original resolution is lost. So 540 TB is a lot of downsampled images! - Mark J. Feldman
Flickr has about 2.5 billion images. - Ole Begemann
I suspect that Gmail has both more images, and more image data. Email is still what many "regular" people use for photo sharing, amazingly. - Paul Buchheit
540TB is puny for 30B images. 19.3KB/photo average. SmugMug has more storage and only ~325M photos. - Don MacAskill
Facebook limits photos to 5Mb each and 50 photos per album, though. - Prolific Programmer
again, I'll pay my yearly fee for Flickr. sorry Facebook. - Andrew Feinberg
Is that photos or images in total? Could be lots of 1-20K png and gifs for apps - Cris Pearson
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The ratio on comments on my Facebook photos to comments on my Flickr photos is probably about 20:1, despite the ratio of number of Facebook photos to number of Flickr photos being about 1:10. Comments are nice, especially for hacks like me that aren't going to get any attention -- deservedly so -- from the folks on Flickr. - Kirk Kittell
@Andrew: Do I trust them to host my photos? Is that what you mean? Or is that a more general question? - Kirk Kittell
I mean do you trust them to host your photos and not use them without your permission? Their TOS lets them use your information for promotional purposes and sell to advertisers. Flickr lets you choose how your photos are licensed. Think about it. - Andrew Feinberg
I use a non-commercial license on Flickr. However, it's a minor issue to me how Facebook handles the photos. The primary reason I use Facebook to share photos is because I will get some reaction from my contacts. I'd trade that aspect for losing control of a few photos any day. If I wasn't a hack, I might change my stance. But I'm a hack. If I don't share on Facebook, I have no reason to think anyone sees my photos, and that's a loss, I think. - Kirk Kittell
@Andrew Feinberg: I think that's an excellent point, but I think you'd be shocked at how many people just don't care. First, the re-use of their photos isn't important to them, second, they think their photos aren't worth re-using, and third, they think of it as a cost to pay for the free service. I don't get it, but tons of people think that way. - Don MacAskill
Photography for me is a hobby, so I don't care what anyone does with my pictures. Indeed, all on flickr are CC-licensed. - Prolific Programmer
Mine are CC also and have been used by some high-traffic blogs and others. But, the choice to allow that is mine alone. Facebook has enough money and user data, they don't need anything else from me. - Andrew Feinberg
@Andrew - I'd trust Facebook over Flickr, since it's not Flickr's policies you should be worrying about, it's Yahoo's - and they definitely have not been playing nice with Flickr users since they took over ... - cerement
@Prolific Programmer The limit for photo's is 60, 3 pages of 20! - Joe Dawson
I don't think that comparing sheer volume really tells anyone anything useful. It's not surprising to me that Facebook would lead on this metric - people literally dump their whole memory card there, uploading hundreds of snapshots from the same party. But all photos are not created equal, and what I've never seen on Facebook though is anything that might be considered *photography*. For that, Flickr clearly rules the roost. - Eric
