By the numbers
In May study, New York-based firm Deloitte Global says 2.5 trillion photos will be shared or stored online this year, about 4.75 million every minute. That’s about 70 percent as many photos — film and digital — as were taken in the entire world during the 186-year period after the earliest-known photo was shot in 1826, according to 2012 estimates by photo sharing site 1000Memories.
If fears of an internet-free, post-apocalyptic wasteland keep you up at nights, sweatily clutching your smartphone and wondering what will become of your Instagram album, there are a bevy of online and real-world services that will create physical copies of selected favorites from among your digital collection.A year ago, Silicon Valley-based technology venture capitalist Benedict Evans decided to try to answer a seemingly simple question: How many photos are taken every year?
Thanks to the ubiquity of camera-equipped smartphones and the massive number of platforms on which digital photographs are shared, the answer was anything but straightforward.
Evans began by tallying the most recent, publicly available statistics from some of the internet’s most popular photo sharing services, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Instagram. Combined, he estimated, the major platforms see annual uploads of at least 2 trillion – yes, with a “T” – photos annually, with less popular sites tacking on an additional 500 billion or so.
“How many more were taken and not shared?” Evans asked in an August 2015 blog post. “It could be double the number of photos shared, or it could be 10 [times as many].”