How many photos does Flickr host?

Thomas Hawk noted in a post about the growth of Flickr that for Flickr "one metric (number of photos online ... can be publicly obtained)".

He didn't note where such info was available, but a little digging shows that uploaded photos get a unique number assigned to them, that equates to the number of images previously uploaded.  Note that Thomas has it wrong - it's not easy to get the number of photos online, but it is easy to get the number uploaded.  Some number of images get deleted - presumably a very small percentage, but the number currently online will be smaller than those which have ever been uploaded.

Ignoring this difference between the numbers, a good source of historical trends of photos uploaded can thus be found by checking the numbers assigned to images uploaded over the period of time that flickr has been available.  A suitable account to check is that of Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, and thus a regular poster from the beginning to the present time.

Her account shows the following dates and numbers: (I've just picked sufficient datapoints to show a trend)

• 15-Dec-03 88
• 31-Dec-03 276
• 26-Feb-04 7445
• 31-May-04 39772
• 29-Sep-04 631538
• 31-Dec-04 2751945
• 31-Mar-05 7964208
• 29-Jun-05 22524347
• 30-Sep-05 48112787
• 30-Dec-05 79628416
• 31-Mar-06 120824395
• 28-Jun-06 177531266
• 29-Sep-06 256102864
• 29-Dec-06 338061633

 

Quickly turning that into a graph shows the following:

The growth was exponential, but there are signs that the rate of growth may be slowing down - the last 3 points on the total uploads are very close to a straight line, and the growth values that I've plotted as a derived line confirm this with the last 2 data points here almost horizontal.

However, it should be noted that the 100 million, 200 million, and 300 million uploaded files all happened in 2006, and that at a rate of almost 1 million uploads per day that's a huge amount of data by anyone's standards.  Remember also that much of this is tagged with metadata that makes finding and using the images so much easier - there are tens of millions of images that have been geotagged with latitude and longitude for example.