Facebook officially filed to become a publicly traded company today and, in doing so, spilled the beans on many of its internal figures and statistics that are normally under wraps. A crazy fact that emerged is that an average of 250 million photographs are uploaded to the service every day. That’s equal to 10.4 million per hour, 174,000 per minute, or 3,000 photographs per second. In terms of storage, the photos and videos hosted by the service take up 100 petabytes, or 100 million gigabytes. Wowzers.

(via PopPhoto)

Hope you guys had a good holiday season. Welcome to 2012! As is our tradition, here’s our annual “state of the blog” post, in which we’ll briefly share on how this blog grew in the past year and where it is now.
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Smartphones are taking huge bites out of the compact camera market. A recent study by market research company NPD found that the percent of photographs taken with a smartphone has increased from 17% to 27% over the past year, while the share of photos taken with a dedicated camera has dropped from 52% to 44%. Senior imaging analyst Liz Cutting says,

There is no doubt that the smartphone is becoming ‘good enough’ much of the time; but thanks to mobile phones, more pictures are being taken than ever before. Consumers who use their mobile phones to take pictures and video were more likely to do so instead of their camera when capturing spontaneous moments, but for important events, single purpose cameras or camcorders are still largely the device of choice.

The point-and-shoot camera market is taking the brunt of the damage: during the first 11 months of 2011, the market lost 17% in units sold and 18% in revenue.

(via NPD via Wired)

Image credit: Image by The NPD Group/Imaging Confluence Study 2011

Welcome to PetaPixel in 2011! The past year went by extremely quickly, and quite a bit has happened on this blog since our last “state of the blog” address post. In this post we’re going to share some statistics about this blog for those of you who are curious or interested in this kinda thing.
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The Washington Post just published an interesting article called “Pros and cons to Facebook’s fast-growing role in digital photography“, which contains quite a few interesting statistics. Among them,

• 40% of households with digital cameras no longer make prints
• 65% of people sharing photos online do it through Facebook
• Less then 33% of people realize that Facebook stores photos at a decreased resolution

The last statistic is quite startling. It means that we may have a whole generation of people who are essentially “throwing away their negatives” after “making very small prints”.

Facebook doesn’t have the capacity to store all the world’s photos without shrinking them first. Facebook just announced that it will increase its maximum photo size by 20 percent. But even with the upgrade, the photo quality on Facebook isn’t useful for more than basic onscreen viewing.

[...] It’s also troubling that most users aren’t aware that uploading a picture to Facebook — and then deleting it from your camera — means you’ve lost the original image for good. [...] This is probably because Facebook photos look just fine on a computer screen.

Remind your friends and family to keep all their original image files. Otherwise, they might need higher resolution versions in the future but find themselves stuck with 720px.

Image credit: Looking at Facebook photo_2008 by hoyasmeg

Welcome to 2010! I can’t believe it’s been 8 months already since we started this blog back in May of 2009. Thanks to all you awesome readers and tweeters who have subscribed to this blog and followed our Twitter account this past year.

In this post, we’re going to share some statistics on the growth of this blog in the past 8 months, in order to give you all a better idea of where we are.

Blog

This is the core of what PetaPixel is. Since launching this blog on May 14, 2009, we’ve written 295 posts across 19 topics. These posts have received 2,893 comments, for an average of 9.8 comments/post.

In terms of traffic, we’ve received 620,077 page views from 362,965 unique visitors since launching. We currently have 2,635 RSS subscribers. Here’s a chart of our subscriber count since the beginning:

The 25 polls we’ve posted so far have received exactly 10,000 votes, and have sparked some pretty interesting conversations.

We’ve also done 12 giveaways where we gave away gear and software worth a total of $4,041. These giveaways received a total of 3,348 entries.

Twitter

PetaPixel is also very active on Twitter. We currently have 31,312 followers, and appear on 3,407 lists. We’ve made 1,777 tweets since creating our account, and our Best of Photography list has 1,559 followers. According to Listorious, this list is the #13 most popular list on Twitter.

On WeFollow, PetaPixel is listed as the #6 most influential and #14 most followed for photography, and #8 most influential and #15 most followed for photographer.

Miscellaneous

On Flickr, our profile has 868 contacts, and our group has 1,348 members. 5,739 photos have been post to our group pool.

We also have 724 subscribers through FriendFeed, who have left a total of 369 comments.

Our Facebook profile currently has 300 friends, and our official page has 760 fans.

In addition to Twitter, we also regularly bookmark helpful and interesting photography-related links to our Delicious account. Two new links are displayed every weekday on the side column of our blog. So far we’ve added 397 awesome links to this account.

What’s Next?

So far, PetaPixel has been a part-time, two-person operation. Jessica is applying to grad schools, and I have one semester left before I earn a MS in CS. I’m hoping to write for PetaPixel full time after I graduate in May, so if this is something you’d like to support, please continue spreading the word about this blog!

Thanks so much to everyone who has visited, subscribed to, retweeted, and commented on PetaPixel in the past 8 months! I’m definitely looking forward to 2010, and hope to see you around as we continue to share photography-related awesomeness!

Image credit: 2009 becomes 2010: Happy New Year! by Optical illusion

Nikon recently conducted a survey called “Picture Yourself”, and released some interesting findings today, a lot of which reveals things about the way people view themselves. The survey was conducted using random telephone dialing, and sampled 1000 Americans 18 and older.

If only we had thought of some of these questions for our weekly polls… Maybe we’ll use a few in the future.

Anyhow, here were some interesting findings:

• 25% would choose to retake a family photo if they could turn back time
• 92% of adults had at least one photograph taken of them so far this year
• 79% believe they look better in person than in photographs (do you?)
  
• 26% chose weight as the feature they dislike the most in photos
• Men have an average of 73 photos taken of them, while women have only 38

Are there any other questions you wish Nikon had included in the survey? Let us know, and we’ll conduct “research” with PetaPixel polls!

(via The Imaging Resource)

Image credit: Mirrored self-misidentification by eqqman

In a post published on their blog yesterday, Tumblr revealed some interesting data on cameras and Canon lenses uploaded to the blogging service, presumably harvested from the EXIF data of each photo.

While much of the data reflects what we know about camera popularity through other means, like Flickr’s Camera Finder and Amazon’s bestselling list, there are certain bits and pieces that we found interesting and would like to highlight.

First, take a look at the chart of cameras sorted in descending order of popularity:

Aside from the fact that people seem to love posting Photo Booth images to their Tumblrs, what caught my eye was the fact that high-end Canon DSLRs (i.e. Canon 5D) seem to be dominating the prosumer lineup (i.e. Canon 40D). On Flickr, all the prosumer DSLRs except the 10D and 50D are represented more than the 5D. Not sure why Tumblr doesn’t reflect the same thing, since photographers more serious about photography seem to gravitate towards Flickr rather than Tumblr.

Like on Flickr, the 50D lags behind the 40D significantly, showing that photographers (myself included), really didn’t see much of a reason to upgrade, and that new purchasers might have opted for a new or used 5D instead.

I think the lens chart that was posted is a bit more interesting, especially since Flickr doesn’t have a corresponding “Lens Finder”:

Here’s my main question: Why on earth is the Canon 50mm 1.8 more represented on Tumblr than the Canon 50mm 1.8 Mk II? The original 50mm 1.8 was discontinued in 1990, and is rare enough nowadays to be selling on eBay for more than double the Mark II, which you can purchase cheaply left and right. Maybe they’re not as rare as we think, but are instead simply being hoarded by photographers who prefer it over the plastic Mark II?

If anyone has any theories or answers to these points that we’ve brought up, let’s discuss them in the comments!

Tumblr camera stats (via CrunchGear)

Image credit: Charts by Tumblr