Facebook Ups Photo Size by Almost 20%

Facebook recently announced that it has increased the maximum size of photographs from 604 pixels to 720 pixels, a difference of 19.2%. They posted the above photograph showing the relative difference in size.

While this is pretty exciting news for those of you who upload your photographs to Facebook (how many of you are there, really?), this is actually a much bigger deal for the company that most people probably realize. With a 20% increase in the size of photograph they allow, they increase their storage demands by at least 20%.

20% for a smaller photo sharing service might not be too significant, but for Facebook it’s a huge change. Why? Because Facebook is the most popular photo sharing service on the web. We’re talking billions of photographs per month, and petabytes of total storage. Just how much data is a petabyte? Check out this neat infographic by Mozy.

Don’t worry though. Facebook’s revenues are expected to be up to $2 billion this year.

P.S. Did we mention we love the prefix “peta”?