Photo sharing has become one of the most popular things to do on social media sites. People of all ages use this function on Facebook and Twitter. Of course, it is used more by teenagers and college students who are sure to have more photos than the average mom with kids, but the difference is surprisingly not that big. The photo sharing stats from social media sites is something people never take note of, but they are absolutely amazing to look at.

The first site I want to talk about is Facebook. Facebook goes through updates regularly where their layout and design is concerned, and a lot of people complain that they do not like it. This does not, however, stop anybody from uploading pictures at a rapid rate. The average amount of pictures uploaded onto Facebook is 250 million per day. In a recent infographic from Mashable they showed that the average female changes their profile picture at least twice a month and the average male at least once a month. At the end of 2010 there were a total of 60 billion photos uploaded on Facebook and it was estimated that by the middle of this year the tally would be at more than 100 billion photos. So in an average photo uploading month, there are more than six billion photos uploaded on Facebook. This of course changes during the holiday seasons. During the New Year and Christmas periods there are more than 750 million photos uploaded.

Twitter has their own photo hosting service called Twitpic but people usually share their images from many different photo sharing services. Twitpic is of course the most popular one from Twitter with 45.7% of photo links going to the site. Yfrog is second with almost 30% of the photo links using their site. Twitter gets about 170 million Tweets a day and about 1.25% of them contain images. That means that about two million photos are shared on Twitter daily. This data is only taken from May of 2011 but I am sure that during the holiday seasons the numbers will grow substantially.

Flickr is a photo sharing service that is dedicated to photo sharing only, but they were overtaken pretty easily by Facebook. Flickr saw their five billionth photo uploaded in September 2010 after starting the service back in 2004. A new photo sharing service called Instagram was released and just nine months after being launched they had 150 million photos uploaded to their service. What’s even more impressive is the fact that all those photos were from iPhones only, as the service was only available on the iOS operating system. Right now Instagram is in the list of top 25 free apps in Apple’s app store and if they expand their service to Android I am sure they would be a top contender in the photo sharing world.

I am interested to see if any photo sharing service is going to overtake Facebook’s amount of photos currently on the site. Even though Instagram has a fast growing user base I don’t think they will be able to overtake the social giant that is Facebook.

Jacky Letard is an experienced online content writer who enjoys writing about various topics such as sony cameras, travel, canon digital slr and other various topics.