Facebook Photos Leave Flickr, Picasa Way Behind
Sometimes, the sheer size of something overwhelms you, the point in question – Facebook. What started off as a social networking website, Facebook now has more photos on it than any other dedicated photo sharing website!
Digest this – Everyday 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded, with each month adding about three billion photos! This is how flabbergasting and enormously huge this is! Facebook is no Photobucket, Flickr or Picasa web album. Still this has resulted in users flocking to the website to share photos with friends. According to comScore, Facebook is growing at three times the speed of top photo websites. Talking about India, Facebook gets about 18 million users per month, compared to 1.91 million users on Flickr and 1.61 million users on Picasa. It is not customary to compare a social networking site and a photo sharing site, but this has become unavoidable in this case.
This trend can be summarized in one word – ’sharing’. On dedicated photo sharing websites, you post your pics in an album and share the link with your friends. You post this link on your social networking sites too. But why use two different platforms, when the social networking sites allow you to post photos? This is precisely the reason why users have started uploading pics on facebook. This is an extension of the exhibitionist behaviour wanting to share the pics with everyone. The comments and likes on the album lead to instant gratification of the user. Most of the albums that you see on facebook are about trips and parties that you may have attended, that is, people centric. The ability to tag your friends is an added benefit.
Other photo sharing websites have recognized this trend and they now allow users to share their pics on their wall with the click of a button. Also, they are trying to drive home the fact that they are websites which host photos specifically and hence, give a lot more flexibility when it comes to uploading photos. Professional photographers prefer using Flickr over Facebook for the sole reason that the Flickr community is filled with people who appreciate photography. You can upload full resolution pictures on Flickr, which you cannot do on facebook. Most of the pictures are not people centric but good photographs that people share so as to get critical acclaim from other users. Also there are professional options like camera model and ISO number and copyright issues that Flickr takes care of. Also, if you want to share only some pics from your album and not let other users see the rest of your album, you can do just that.
The bottom line is that when you talk about pictures, Facebook is about people and Flickr is about photography. There always will be photo sharing websites for the sole reason that it creates an elite community of people who appreciate photography and not just pictures of them having a good time.
In India too, around 64 per cent of the people use facebook for its photo sharing feature and about 36 per cent access the video features. These figures show that Indians are also eager to showcase themselves on social media.
With the amount of data being uploaded on Facebook, it has become a data monster. What do you think about this trend? Is it time for you to upload another picture of yourself on facebook? 
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off course Facebook is turning in to a monster…
… I hope social networks don’t change the way we socialize…
but it has also made people go crazy about sharing photos.. Photos are made to show off..People spend a whole lot of time just to ensure they stand out better than others
Interesting information. I had no idea that Facebook had so many more photos than Flickr. Since Facebook only lets you upload at a maximum of 640 pixels and it performs some pretty lossy compression from what I can see, the fact that photos take up so much physical memory is astounding.
I personally love to tag people in photos on Flickr, but not that many of my friends are on Flickr, so I do more people tagging on Facebook. I tend to post on Facebook mostly photos of people I know who are on Facebook. I post other stuff, too, when I only want to share it with my friends and not put it out there to the world.
Good post and thanks for the link to my post.