MARILYN CORNWELL: Marilyn's Photos - July 23 2026

One estimate is that we take 5.3 billion photos a day and another is 1 trillion pictures every day. There are about 95 million photos posted to Instagram and 300 million to Facebook every day.

There's a photo of the day every day on BING. For more variety, we can go to the Canadian National Geographic Photo of the Day, NASA Image of the Day. Today's NASA image is the Large Magellanic Cloud of our Milky Way. There's an explanation of it being a dwarf irregular galaxy.

Going to the Canadian National Geographic Photos of the Day the picture is a racoon, so not very distinct.

There's a listing for TIME, but it shows pictures from 2013. And there's a listing for The Guardian. They post photos of the day selected from the news feed.

It seems that we the common people are posting the most photos of the day. Where do all those photos go? What does Facebook and Instagram do with the millions of daily images? It targets advertising, trains AI, personalizes content - things like this. And then what? How do they store it all? They have 4 petabytes - that's 4 million gigabytes - of new data a day. There's a Quora entry HERE that describes the amount and type of storage, and says that Facebook spends $30,000,000,000 a year to keep up its infrastructure.

It seemed like a harmless question, and went straight off the cliff in no time.

A mass display at Lilycrest Gardens a few years ago.