Facebook's photo count breaks 10 billion, surpassing websites like Flickr

According to foreign media reports, although Facebook is not essentially a photo sharing website, it currently has an astonishing number of stored images, even surpassing the photo sharing site Photobucket under News Corporation and Flickr under Yahoo!

On Tuesday evening, Doug Beaver, an engineer at Facebook, claimed on his blog that the total number of Facebook photos had exceeded 1 million. This social networking site announced in August this year that it had over 100 million active users.

On the other hand, News Corporation's image website Photobucket had nearly 6.2 billion photos by Wednesday morning, while Yahoo!'s Flickr reached 2 billion just less than a year ago.

CNET's well-known blogger Caroline McCarthy pointed out that although Facebook seems very popular now, it also faces problems. Facebook stores four different sizes for each photo, which means it needs servers to store more than 4 billion photos, requiring a large amount of storage equipment - although storage devices are cheap now, they are not free to use.

In May this year, Facebook borrowed $100 million to enhance its services. Although the company is a favorite among venture capital institutions, when its revenue will catch up with server expenses is still unknown. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, said last week that the company aims to become profitable within three years.

Sina Tech