Photo-sharing on the Web keeps getting more popular as people transfer more of their digital photos from their the black holes of their computer hard drives to social networks where their friends and family can actually see them. Although Facebook Photos has emerged as the largest photo-sharing service in terms of users and is one of the fastest-growing of any size, it is still not the largest by the sheer number of images that it stores.
That honor, for the moment, goes to ImageShack, which currently hosts 20 billion images, I’ve confirmed with the company (for more background on ImageShack, read this post). Facebook holds 15 billion photos, according to a spokesperson there. But it should catch up by the end of the year. Facebook users are adding photos at a rate of 850 million photos a month, compared to 100 million photos a month by ImageShack users. Good thing Facebook just fixed its storage architecture to be able to handle the bigger load. Clarification: The numbers used in this post are for unique images. Facebook actually has 60 billion image files because it stores each image in four different sizes. But it stores 15 billion unique photos. The 20 billion Imageshack figure is also for unique images but ImageShack founder Jack Levin says that it is an estimate and there could be 10 percent duplication. The Flickr and Multiply numbers below I’ve also confirmed are unique numbers.
After Facebook and ImageShack, the third largest image warehouse on the Web appears to be News Corp’s PhotoBucket, with 7.2 billion photos. And then Yahoo’s Flickr comes in at 3.4 billion, which also includes some videos. Interestingly, coming in right behind Flickr in the photo count is social network Multiply, with 3 billion images. Multiply’s photo=sharing options are one of its main strengths, which make sit attractive to its core demographic of families and moms (an area where Facebook is still struggling). Picasa is probably up there somewhere, but Google won’t get any more specific than “billions” of photos have been uploaded “and millions of photos are uploaded every day.”
In fact, with the exception of Photobucket, none of these services publicly discloses its latest image count. I had to ask each company individually. Some companies like Shutterfly refuse to disclose their numbers, and they are a publicly traded company. I am still waiting to hear back from Kodak about KodakGallery..com, but the trend lines of these older photo storage services are not encouraging (see second chart at the bottom of the post). Below are the figures I was able to collect directly from each company:
Image Warehouses On The Web (numbers are total images stored)
-
ImageShack: 20 billion
Facebook: 15 billion
PhotoBucket: 7.2 billion
Flickr 3.4 billion
Multiply: 3 billion
Picasa “billions” (?)
While Google chose to be vague, Yahoo was completely transparent. It provided the following additional stats on Flickr:
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Photos/videos uploaded daily: 3 million (implies 90 million a month)
Photos that are public: 50%
Photos that are tagged: 30%
Geo-tagged photos: 110 million
Number of unique tags: 38 million
Amount of traffic that comes from search engines: 75%
And Multiply shared with me the fact that its 12.5 million registered users are uploading an impressive 75 million photos a month. That comes to six photos per day per registered user, which is actually more than Facebook. Since Multiply encourages high-resolution uploads, it is handling 2.5 terabytes per day in image uploads. A little under one percent of its users, or 10,000 of them pay $20 a year for premium services such as unlimited storage and photo album backups. The one percent of premium users accounts for between 5 and 7 percent of all uploads.
If you look at comScore numbers, however, it is clear that Facebook is gaining the most usage overall, with 161 million unique visitors worldwide in February. Flickr is a distant but strong second with 76.5 million visitors. Photobucket is at 58.6 million uniques, Picasa is at 39.9 million, and ImageShack is at 33.2 million.
I love Flickr tools, API and the service is very fast in general. It’s ideal for make mashups.
Imageshack has 20 billion images, unfortunately 10 billion of those images are exceeding bandwidth and are not shown.
So true and so sad
Yeah you are correct. Also the reason of its popularity(in terms of usage) is because most of the uploaders(piracy people) uses imageshack on torrent sites and forums. So I think this could be the reason of that “imagehack is having the most photos”.
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
Any idea why they used a frog for their logo?
And a yellow frog for that matter…
The Panamanian golden frog
Can you lick it? Funny Wikipedia entry, BTW. By one side, it says it’s nearing extinction and by the other it mentions a myth that when the frog dies, it turns to gold. Duh.
yo
I hope all those companies ramp up and promote their face tagging technology.
You should probably specify exactly what “total images stored” means. Flickr and many other photo sites store multiple sizes of each photo. So Flickr might have 3.4 billion unique images, but 15 billion images stored, not counting redundant copies of the same file & size.
Smugmug publishes their numbers (507 million right now), but they store up to 8 sizes of each image.
Regardless, the sheer amount of storage is incredible.
These are unique images, not counting duplication. Except the ImageShack estimate might include 10% duplication, which would put its uniques at 18B. I’ve clarified above.
Is this number an asset or a liability?
That is the key question.
liability
Is there a list of who has the highest deleted image rate? That golden frog is engraved into my soul.
Photo != Images
Imageshack must have a lot more images than facebook.
Facebook crushes all of ‘em when it comes to genuine PHOTOS.
Hah! Zillions of Facebook users upload pics of anime characters (among other nonsense) in thier supposed “photo” albums.
Not sure what facebook you use.
But I’ve been using fb since I started uni in 2005. And little has changed in terms of quality of photos: drunk cuties, uploading hundreds of pics, every weekend.
As a proportion, you are COMPLETELY misinformed if you think facebook’s photo:crappy-anime-stuff ratio is anywhere near imageshack’s.
Yeah, is this guy the biggest nerd ever? I’d say at most 1% of FB ‘images’ are non-photos. The only non-photos I usually see are maybe a drawing an artist student has put up or that stupid recent fad of having different characters with names and assigning your friends to one of them.
I find it really odd that Facebook beats out Flckr. I’m far more inclined to share more photos on the latter than the former (and in fact, I do).
Short answer: ImageShack
ImageShack and others are big with a demographic that most of us ignore: moms.
Most women/moms I know post, share, edit and print pics from sites I never touch.
If Facebook ever let you upload your image files with their original size and quality in tact it would make Facebook even more popular. That’s the only thing holding me back from uploading all my pix onto Facebook.
Completely agree. I’d transfer my flickr photos to facebook in a heartbeat if they preserved the size and quality.
What is the purpose of this article? Are the number of images stored good or bad? Did you consider the size of the photo?
You should realize a company isn’t obliged to disclose this information just because it’s publicly traded.
it may be no use for you; don’t forget that there could be other people who could turn this into something….
I agree that for this article to have any validity you must first define what a ‘photo’ is. I check out top Fliker photos daily (through popurls.com) and see mostly serious photographers posting their own work.
The question about unique vs multiple sizes also is important.
I find that a little hard to believe that they would have almost triple Photobucket and more than facebook. They must be counting thumbnails and alt sizes.
Anyone know where SmugMug stands in all this?
i am wondering too, did not find any balance information about them.
It’s no surprise that Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, and SnapFish are waning in popularity. Their business model is based on printing (not hosting like ImageShack and PhotoBucket) and their sharing capabilities have always lagged behind the social sites (i.e., Facebook, Multiply, etc.). They also don’t have the companion desktop tools like Picassa/Google Web Albums and PhotoshopExpress.
SmugMug has found a sweet spot for printing by focusing on pros and advanced amateurs and then charging for a subscription. They then partner with other outfits to do the printing and make products/gifts. Zenfolio has also done an excellent job of doing this through their partnership with Mpix. However, it seems that both of these sites target the pro/advance amateur rather than the consumer. Most everyday Joe’s are pretty sufficed with just looking at photos online these days and don’t see the need to print them out. Sadly, this means that the future probably isn’t too bright for some of the consumer-oriented printing sites unless they are able to adapt their models.
So is facebook worth 10 billion 15 billion or 30 billion? Image shack worth 10 billion or 5 billion?
Who has the most revenue of them all…?
*sri *sri…
that is an interesting question. i am wondering how much they earn through membership and how much with the ad-serving. if anybody has information on this … please post.
Hey Eric,
I know that TechCrunch loves to ignore anything-and-everything Microsoft related, but really… Windows Live already had 5.2 billion images in *2006* (per http://www.micr...veSpacesFS.mspx), and that was after 2 years of operation. It’s been almost 3 years since then, you do the math…
And yes, I’m a ’softie and proud of it.
MS poorly touches almost everything and I guess no need to include it
ms has always been secretive about their operative circles.
The article says ImageShack customers upload 100 million images a month. At that rate, it would take 16.7 years to accumulate 20 billion images.
The article should have compared companies on an apples to apples basis using unique images stored, discounting for backup copies and screen proxies.
why don’t you then write another article!
I’m sure I read a while ago that Facebook was already the biggest, guess this means I shouldn’t believe everything I read online
Yes, you don’t have to take anything as-is from any source… Internet, Paper, Book, TV, Government, Friend, Husband, Wife, Mother, Father, Brother, Sister…. you have to use your mind and your instinct to do the analysis in order to reach to a conclusion
They are the biggest by monthly uploads and by users, just not yet by total unique images stored.
wow
isn’t there like obseen amounts of porn images on imageshack? can that really count? and i really can’t believe how fast this facebook thing is growing. did it take over myspace yet?
The reason imageshack has all these images is because of PORN and because they allow anonymous uploads. And I’m sure this ridiculous 20 BILLION number includes all the resizes of the same image.
BTW, simply counting the total number of images stored is a retarded metric. Who cares if Imageshack has 27,000 thumbnails of the same Jenna Jameson pic exceeding its bandwidth?
For photographers (pro and am) Flickr wins by a mile.
Quantity doesn’t necessarily make a site good. If users are more selective about what they upload, then the site will have fewer photos but be more rewarding to look at. If users always upload the entire contents of their memory card then the good photos become too expensive time-wise to find. If the data is, in practical terms, inaccessible then there is not much point in burning loads of energy in server/storage farms to keep it. (Unless you are going to burn up even more energy, so that it can be auto-indexed using face recognition.)
Its not just the photo websites, its the same problem at home as well. My wife’s recently machine ground to a halt when unsorted photos ate up the last 50GB of her disk space – too many to sort just get another disk and dump them on it. In my fight to avoid data overload, it took me an hour to reduce 100 photos of a gig to the 30 best, of which I uploaded 6.
So, I think valuing photo sites based on size is misleading. It would be useful if TechCrunch could re-evaluate the sites considering the above – if you can find the data.
These are all businesses and what matters is the revenue (and profits) they generate. The online photo sites may be smaller in unique visitors but they generate over $200M each in revenue (look at shutterfly public info). How much does imageshack or flickr generate in revenue? Sharing is not a big business – printing and photo products are a real multi-billion dollar business and aren’t dying anytime soon….
It appear that AOL signed an agreement with Orfeuso.com http://www.orfeuso.com the new search engine for the social network is accessible on Yedda this engine was already like Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Hi5, Yahoomail
imageshack is full of spammers and phishers (users, not that owners/admins). i just recently had to filter their domain from my site because of the people abusing their service and effecting mine.
for all these companies listed, are you counting the number of photos uploaded as the initial photo uploaded by the user, or the number of versions on each hosted site? ie: last time i looked, facebook will make 4 versions of each photo uploaded. are the total counts including all the versions or just the original?
also, the comScore numbers reflect people viewing embedded content on site A as a unique viewer to the origin site (Flickr for example), correct? if that’s the case, it makes facebooks numbers even more impressive.
cheers,
-mike
There’s a completely different use for image hosting/sharing when you’re comparing Facebook to a site like imageshack or even tpiwwp.com. Facebook is for photos, sharing and storing images that users deem as significant, but with tpiwwp or even imageshack, it’s more about getting it up there to be hosted temporarily.
i find imageshack fishy, i mean i am scared to upload any of my personal images. But then that is just my POV, but they look really shady
their CEO has been known to violate their own terms of service/privacy policies to get vindictive revenge against message board users he did not agree with. details at this digg thread – http://digg.com...hy_Just_for_fun
this is a poorly written article
Hey I thought it is only me who is dumb, but I just learned that there is also another one who thinks he is dumb but in fact you are no near to that level.
Believe me I know how dumb looks like.
I am the dumb who commented with the name dumb in this article before “dumb – April 8th, 2009 at 3:56 pm PDT” and approve this message.
dumberer
i have about 8 or 9 thousand full resolution photos stored with multiply. i haven’t shared quite that many on my site (for which my friends and family are thankful) but i do love that there are no album size limits, no sharing limits (even for free accounts) and their photo printing options are actually fun to use. (i’m still hoping i can throw a pic on a mug at some point, but the books and calendars rock.)
on the other hand, i could probably count the number of pictures i’ve shared via facebook on my fingers and toes. and for each picture uploaded there are at least 5 inappropriate words that i shouted as i fought with the blasted system just to get those pictures up and edited before they’re posted. multiply’s autouploader has definitely spoiled me.
Nice post, I think it’s worth sharing here about a photography website, http://www.aperture.in that offers amateur and professional photographers to create unlimited number of photo albums and a plenty of features to manage their photo albums. This time, the site does not seem to have many photo albums/ photos yet, I liked the site.
hi
i wonder how on many servers the big sites run and what they are paying for the hosting. does anybody have a link for further information ?
i would defenitely say imageshack.
i wonder how big imagevenue is at the moment, anybody who knows.
lol sorry but ive just got to say this! when i saw the yellow glowing frog at the top of the page it reminded me of those hogwarts chocolate frogs you could buy in tescos. lol