interesting

[Rob]

The article below, says every 2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the
whole of humanity took in the 1800s. In fact, ten percent of all the photos
that exist were taken in the past 12 months.
Text and link below.
How many photos have ever been taken?
By Jonathan Good September 15, 2011
http://bit.ly/qkKZ3c
".. how many "Kodak memories" has humanity recorded? How fast are we
snapping photos today?
.. the 20th century was the golden age of analog photography peaking at an
amazing 85 billion physical photos in 2000 -- an incredible 2,500 photos per
second.
..it is estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have a digital
camera[6]. If the average person snaps 150 photos this year that would
be a staggering 375 billion photos. That might sound implausible but
this year people will upload over 70 billion photos to Facebook,..
Already Facebook's photo collection has a staggering 140 billion
photos, that's over 10,000 times larger than the Library of
Congress.[8]
Even accounting for population growth the exponential growth of photos
is incredible (we take 4 times as many photos as 10 year ago). ..
in total we have now taken over 3.5 trillion photos." etc

The other question is how many images have actually been printed?

Just a very small percentage.

[Noons]

..it is estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have a digital
camera[6]. If the average person snaps 150 photos this year that would
be a staggering 375 billion photos. That might sound implausible but
this year people will upload over 70 billion photos to Facebook,..
Already Facebook's photo collection has a staggering 140 billion
photos, that's over 10,000 times larger than the Library of
Congress.[8]

and yet, amazingly, most of my photos in FB were taken with a film camera.
Isn't it frustrating how extrapolation used after a statistic really means nothing?

And don't get me started on how many of those will never be printed or the
origionals seen. I know for a fact that many of my friends have lost all their
digital photos when the "hard disk" in their computer crashed.

What, anyone expected such users to know what a "backup" is and how to do it?