Aug 5, 2011 12:44 GMT  ·  By

Flickr has announced an impressive milestone, just as competitor (to a degree) Instagram revealed some of its latest numbers. There are now six billion images hosted on Flickr, the six billionth being added earlier this week.

That's a lot of photos, though Flickr has been at it for quite a few years now. In a world without Facebook, the number would also make Flickr a giant in photo sharing and hosting.

Facebook does exist and is closing in on 100 billion photos hosted on the site, a number no one will be catching up to any time soon.

This doesn't necessarily steal from Flickr's achievement, the two sites are vastly different, while Facebook is clogged with thousands upon thousands of vacation photos, five shots of the same tree and that sort of thing, Flickr users do actually care about quality.

"The beautiful Montbretia flower photo shown here is our 6 billionth photo! It was uploaded Monday by eon60," Flickr wrote.

"Over the last 5 years uploads have been increasing 20% year-over-year and we love hitting a milestone like this," the site said.

"It’s the ability to wander through the titles, tags, geotags, camera info, groups, comments, favs, and everything else associated with the photos that make the huge collection of photos on Flickr so unique. The more photos you upload, the more we all can explore!," it added.

Flickr says that the number of uploads has risen by 20 percent for the past five years, so more photos are added to Flickr today than they were a few years ago.

That said, perhaps Flickr should be focusing on other things rather than photo uploads, since it's clearly not going to be able to compete with Facebook on this front.

Instead, the site should be playing up its strengths, being a place for people with a passion for photography to share pics. Of course, Flickr's biggest threat right now may not even be Facebook, but rather all of the mobile photo sharing services that have been springing up.