Facebook may be a social network rather than a photo-sharing site, but that hasn’t stopped its 100 million users from uploading over 10 billion photos to its servers. That’s more than dedicated photo repositories such as Photobucket and Flickr. But can Facebook afford the huge costs associated with that kind of storage?

Anyone who uses Facebook on a regular basis will know that lots of people tend to dump all their photos on to the site. This includes the out-of-focus shots, the drunken party shots and the ones of their kids posing adorably. And all of those pictures have added up to a huge milestone.

Engineer Doug Beaver announced the 10 billion photo milestone on the Facebook blog. He also makes note of the fact that due to Facebook storing four image sizes for each picture uploaded, the site has over 40 billion files.

2-3 terabytes of photos are uploaded to the site every day, with one petabyte (a storage size I’ve never even heard of) set aside for photo storage. The 10 billion photos compare favorably to Photobucket and Flickr, which have around 6.2 billion and 2 billion photos on them respectively.

This is interesting for two reasons, as detailed below.

Does Facebook eschew the need for a dedicated photo-sharing service such as Flickr? Not only does Facebook allow you to upload and share photos with your friends, it has lots of other features going for it too, leaving its niche competitors somewhat out in the cold.

On the other hand, is this level of photo uploading good for Facebook? The company is operating purely on venture capital and while that means costs aren’t yet an issue, they will be one day. This sort of storage capacity costs big money, all of which has got to come from somewhere. Good job then that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks he’ll have a business model in place by 2011.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 1:03 am under Internet, Opinion, Social Media, Technology, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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