How Many Facebook Photos Belong to Deceased Users?
By Nathan Lustig on Nov 30 th, with 1 COMMENT
There are 3 billion photos uploaded to Facebook every single month. That means, on average, every Facebook user is uploading about 5 photos every month, or 60 every year. We’ve estimated that 1.5m Facebook users will die this year worldwide, so what does that mean for their photos?
Assuming that all 1.5m Facebook users have been members for 1 year, this means that 90m Facebook photos are uploaded by Facebook users who die each year. I’ve been a Facebook user since 2004 and have over 1000 Facebook photos that I’ve uploaded or have been tagged of me. I bet the total number of Facebook photos is much higher than the 60 we estimated above, because most users have been members for over one year. If we assume that the majority of Facebook users have been members for 2 years, we can estimate that 180m Facebook photos are trapped online each year because the users have passed away.
Since anyone born after about 1999 probably doesn’t have a single physical photo, it’s incredibly important to make sure that your photos are transferred to your family. I have photos from trips around the world, sporting events with my friends and even mundane activities that will be interesting to see 20 years from now and potentially even more interesting to my family after I’m gone.
It’s important to make a plan so you can decide which of your digital photos are transferred to heirs and which are deleted when you pass away. You can start making your plan on Entrustet, or you can start just by thinking about which photos you want kept for posterity, and which you want to be deleted to preserve your legacy.
January 20, 2011 at 2:14 pm, Nathan Lustig said:
@byanofsky this one's our methodology http://ow.ly/3H8Fx and another one on how many photos deceased users leave behind http://ow.ly/3H8Hm