Images tell the story

In our increasingly visual world images tell the story. Social networks have been early in recognizing this, together with the human urge to post, share, view, like and comment on photos. Images are the number one driver behind social network growth, helped by features that will make users upload even more photos, such as (auto) tagging and ‘awesomizing’ features.

In 2014 over 1.8BN photos were uploaded and shared PER DAY on platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Flickr. In late 2013 Yahoo already predicted the number of photos taken in 2014 to approach a staggering 1 trillion thanks to the selfie explosion. We are talking here about ‘big data’ sets.

To deal with this amount of pictures on the Facebook network, for example, Facebook alone has built three ‘cold storage’ data centers to store less popular or outdated photos. Each of their 16,000 square-foot data centers is able to hold an exabyte of data, similar to about one million computer hard drives. These images will not only be stored and indexed to easily retrieve them.