Windows Live Photos Reaches 1 Billion Uploaded Pictures Mark

Microsoft's online storage and sharing service for digital images under the Windows Live brand has reached the 1 billion uploaded pictures mark. The past week, the Redmond company announced that, in just seven months since the introduction of Windows Live Photos, the service contributed a great deal to the total of seven billion images that were uploaded on Windows Live. Launched in December 2008, Windows Live Photos is designed to offer customers an online repository for their digital images.

“A few weeks ago we hit a milestone for Windows Live Photos: one billion photos uploaded! This is a significant part of the more than seven billion photos posted on Windows Live today (most of which were uploaded before we launched "Windows Live Photos" as a separate service),” a member of the Windows Live Photos team revealed.

The service, in addition to letting users upload and store their content in the Microsoft Cloud, is also set up to streamline social networking. Stored images can in this regard, be shared with other users, who have the possibility to comment on the content made available via Windows Live Photos.

“Just how significant is a billion photos? Well, if you signed up for a new account and started uploading one photo per second, you would upload your billionth photo some time in 2040! According to a report by Forrester Research last year, the average owner of a digital camera only takes 28 digital photos per month. At that rate, it would take the entire population of Seattle nearly five years to take a billion photos,” the Windows Live Photos team representative added.

Each Windows Live photos account gives the user a total of 25GB of online storage space for digital images. Microsoft failed to offer any statistics related to the actual storage space necessary to accommodate 1 billion photos, or the number of users with active Windows Live Photos accounts. However, the company did reveal that photo albums created with the service had been shared in excess of 250 million times since December 2008.