On November 3, 2008, the 3 billionth picture was uploaded to flickr generating 16,762 views for the photo until now. Had I not subscribed to Bryan Alexander’s blog this memorable moment would have passed unnoticed for me. Now I can pause for a second and contemplate a little bit.

• If every person on earth had uploaded a picture to flickr, almost 45% of the population would have already done so. According to the CIA World Factbook there are 6,706,993,152 people (estimate of July 2008).
• My flickr statistics show that I uploaded 373 photos. That is just 0.00001% of 3 billion.
• However, my pictures have already been viewed 3,614 times as of now (excluding my views). That is much more exposure than they would have ever gotten in my paper photo albums.
• One photo even made it into an online article.
• How many flickr photos do not have the traditional copyright? Most of the pictures I post have a Creative Commons license and can be used freely.

I have many more pictures still sitting on a hard drive waiting to be uploaded, and then there are all those that are not yet digitized… Thus, I will continue to contribute photos to flickr.

almost the 3 billionth photo