I’ve just learned that September 18th 2010 was a monumentally significant day.

Er.

Well, okay, maybe not that significant. Or that monumental. But interesting nevertheless. In a vague kind of way.

For apparently it was the day that Flickr (the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site, of which I just happen to be a member) witnessed the five billionth photograph uploaded to it! That’s a lot of piccies. And here’s the official confirmation from Flickr (who, interestingly, also use WordPress for their blog).

I’ve had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Flickr almost from the first day I joined (back in June 2006) but, putting all gripes aside, basically I still think it’s the best photo-sharing site of its kind.

Not the largest though, not nowadays. Not, at least, according to CNN (yep, they picked up on the news about Flickr as well… how’s that for exposure?) who refer to claims by Facebook that something like 15 billion pics had been uploaded there as at April ’09.

Thing is though, there’s no real comparison ’twixt the two for the sites have different rationales and satisfy different requirements.
Then there’s the not totally irrelevant consideration that, putting it bluntly, Facebook sucks. In fact, its complete suckiness makes my occasional moans about Flickr pale into, well, nothing really.

So, five billion and climbing. That can’t be bad. And hopefully its an indication that Flickr’s likely to be with us for quite a while yet. Jolly well hope so anyway, given all the pics I’ve uploaded there (nowhere near five billion I’d hasten to add!), and the fact that I use it as my principal pic repository for feeding images to this blog and suchlike. Were it to suddenly disappear I’d be a bit… um… scuppered so to speak.

And so would this blog!

Btw, I’m here on Flickr if you fancy visiting