Last month, the Library of Congress finally finished a project they started all the way back in 2008: they finished digitizing an archive of 467 panoramic postcards from the early 1900′s. All of these postcards are now available online for interested folks to peruse through, learn from and enjoy. Read more…

One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of “big camera” sensors into “small camera” bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that’s smaller in size, why wouldn’t you want to? (That’s the idea, at least).

The quality and portability of cameras these days would be quite astonishing to photographers from back in the earlier days of photography — the days in which you needed both hands and a strong back to work as a photojournalist. In this post, we’ve compiled photos from those “good ol’ days” to see how far photography has come.
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When you think about photographs from the early 1900s, you probably think about boring monochrome photos of locations or portraits of people with humorless expressions and rigid poses. Photographs costed more in terms of time, effort, and money back then, so photographers didn’t waste them on silly photos, right? Wrong.

This series of photographs was created around 1905 by an unknown artist. Titled Bulldogs in Fancy Dress, it’s being preserved for eternal chuckles in the Library of Congress’ photo archives.
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Facebook is by far the world’s largest photo service, but how does its massive image collection compare with other website and photo libraries? 1000memories created this interesting graphic showing the relative sizes of the world’s largest photo libraries.

Digital cameras are now ubiquitous – it is estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have a digital camera. If the average person snaps 150 photos this year that would be a staggering 375 billion photos. That might sound implausible but this year people will upload over 70 billion photos to Facebook, suggesting around 20% of all photos this year will end up there. Already Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.

I wonder what future generations will think of the photos being uploaded to Facebook these days…

How many photos have ever been taken? [1000memories]