Facebook Photo Archive Will Get “Smarter” with Photos and Digital Scanning

There are roughly 3.5 trillion photos in existence in the world. Facebook boasted a repository of more than 140 billion photos at the start of 2012. This includes digital photos, which make up the majority obviously, and those uploaded with digital scanning. People currently take about 380 billion photos a year, slightly less than 50% of them captured with camera phones. Facebook anticipates that it will have had 70 billion new photos uploaded over the course of 2012, or roughly 18% of all photos captured in the same year.

This is by far the largest collection of photos on the planet and is estimated to contain fully 4% of all photos ever taken. And it means a number of things for how photography and technology will develop in the near future. And as having gone public puts increasing pressure on the social network to invent new monetary streams, it’s a fair bet they will look to get value from this huge and expensive archive.



With nearly 500 billion photos, Facebook will have enough information to help scientists develop incredibly accurate facial recognition software. They’re already working on decreasing the amount of false positives with their automatic tagging tools, and users are inadvertently helping them refine algorithms. We can all imagine what could happen if a publically accessible repository of photos became available or if Facebook were able to sell this tool to marketing firms and other companies, creating a world where cameras mounted throughout public spaces could recognize us instantly.

Beyond obvious uses of digital photos, the way it collects these photos and data about them will offer Facebook a lot more information. As opposed to using digital scanning to share an old photo, digital shots that we often capture using smart phones and upload through a mobile connection we often tell Facebook exactly where we are using GPS and geotagging. It leads to relatively mundane things like the potential for Facebook to construct places or even your experience based on photos you upload, as well as to glean information about users that would be incredibly valuable to marketers based on where you go and what you like to do.



Furthermore, a few professionals at the company consider Facebook “the world’s most powerful instrument for studying human society.” This mainly refers to the aggregate of the information it collects, not just photos. But the constant upload of new photos becomes even more powerful in light of all this information. Algorithms that analyze basic info in the photos along with the information people associate with them and the photographer or uploader could learn a great deal about trends in our tastes and activities, be it for commercial or scholastic purposes. For example, if software were developed to compare the physical characteristics of a person in a photo such as pallor and posture, against other, older photos of the same person, it could identify emerging illness. Combined with information about the person’s location and activity, this could hypothetically be used to pinpoint the “patient zero” in disease outbreaks.

Obviously, the power of the Facebook photo collection will increase as people upload more photos, more frequently, and closer to the time the photograph is captured. Similarly, the tools to analyze them, all this “big data” as it is called, are just slowly being imagined, let alone designed and tested. But the message is clear. For better or worse, Facebook is learning ever more about its users, through digital scanning of old photos, digital photo uploads, and the information we share, and it’s only a matter of time before it can crystallize the photos you upload into clear information about you and your surroundings.

Tags: : digital scanning; digital photos

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Photography History, Products, Random Fun Stuff, Social Web, digital photography, iPhone, photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.