Friday's Video: Photos on the Internet ~ How Many & What Do They Weigh?

If you like number factoids and trying to chase grease pigs, then you are going to love the challenge of trying to pin down an estimated count of the photographic images on the Internet!

First Things First!
In order to begin, for most of us a vocabulary lesson is in order. Reason? Well, quite frankly whoever you end up siding with in the debate of how many images are zooming around on the Internet the numbers get big really fast. So big in fact, that you may very well need to move beyond what you thought in high school math were gargantuan numbers such as millions, billions, and trillions. New numbers like quadrillions, quintillions, sextillions, on up to duodecillions (1000 sextillions) are going to need to be added!

Here’s the list.

Shifting Through the Rubble
The next part of this adventure is to seek some facts. But here is where we run into our next challenge. Seems the Internet is growing at such a phenomenally fast pace, especially with regards to it use with imaging. Facebook currently has 955 million users, Twitter has 500 million, Google+ captures the bronze medal with 250 million. [source] Each encourage users to post and share photos socially. This doesn’t even take into consideration all the many other photo sharing sites distributed throughout the Internet.

And...the counting part is hard, too! Take for instance just Instagram. Its 80 million users are posting an estimated 5 to 10 million photos each day. That's the equivalent of this one service adding 50-100 photos every second 24/7! It has gotten so big the This is Now Project just released by Instagram is a visual composition which uses real-time updates from the ever popular application based on users geo-tag locations to streams photos instantly as soon as they are uploaded. The tool capturing a specific city's movement almost real time, or “in a fluid story”, as the project creators describe.

Here Goes Nothing!
So, there are a few brave souls willing to step out there and give answering this question a go. The best part is they use...images! We will leave it up to you to decide.

However, whatever you conclude there is no doubt we can all agree with stu_the_kilted_scot whose response was voted ‘best answer’ 5 years ago when someone pondered this same topic then posted it to Yahoo! Answers looking for input. Stu's winning reply..."Question unanswerable, as it changes second by second. But LOTS and LOTS and LOTS.”

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