The oldest photo on record of a person is of a man on a Paris street getting his shoes shined. It was taken in 1838. In the first 170 years of photography up to the year 2000 it is estimated that 85 billion photos were taken.
In 2014 alone, thanks to selfies, almost 1 trillion photos were taken and the number is expected to grow in 2015.
According to Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers in her
annual Internet trends report over 500 million photos were shared on Flickr, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook as of May 2013. That number had jumped 260% to 1.8 billion by May 2014.
Facebook has a collection of over 140 billion photos.
Approximately 70 million photos are posted on Instagram daily, or 25.5 billion a year.
It is estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have digital camera (mostly cell phones). In 2014 there were an estimated 2.31 billion picture taking devices sold and that number is expected to grow 23% in 2015.
Licensing Images
Creators of something less than 500 million of all these images expect to be paid something when one of their images is used. Is it any wonder that when the vast majority of images viewers and users see do not require licensing that so many people think all images should be free for anyone to use as they wish?