Instagram may reach 1 billion photos in April

Instagram, one of my favourite apps, is growing like crazy. In September last year, I noted that users had uploaded 200 million photos, which meant that the growth rate in August was about 50 million photos per month. Now, it seems that users are adding the same number in just 11 days.

According to my calculations, Instagram passed 500 million photos on Jan 2, 2012 and 550 million on Jan 13. That means that 4.5 million photos are uploaded each day to Instagram and at that speed 1 billion photos will be reached about April 20, or possibly sooner if the service continues to add new users.

If you want to check the dates of the different milestone photos used in the graph above, follow the links below:

07-16-2010: 2

11-19.2010: 5000001

02-09-2011: 25000002

04-09-2011: 50000000

19-06-2011: 100000000

02-09-2011: 200000000

29-10-2011: 300000001

07-12-2011: 400000000

02-01-2012: 500000000

08-01-2012: 525000000

13-01-2012: 550000000

Some even numbers are not available, I suspect because they are private (or have been deleted). The ID’s of the milestones have been recovered by using Statigram and Ink360.com. There’s no guarantee that the ID numbers from theses sites are an accurate reflection of the total volume, but previously this way of counting has proven to be quite accurate.

Footnote: I’m @kullin on Instagram.