For the past couple years now, I’ve been wondering how my Flickr account stacks up to all the other Flickr accounts out there… in terms of size. After my first big push to Flickr I just about cracked the 10,000 mark, and since then I’ve added about another 15,000 photos (and videos) to my bulging Photostream. It shocks me really, but when you break it down it’s only like 3 or 4 thousand pictures per year. It’s still a lot of photos, but it’s not unreasonable.
A few days ago I decided to see if Google could help me find the largest Flickr Photostream. Unfortunately, that search returns 2 results which both point to the exact same blog with a link to GiddyGirlie’s Photostream which has about 16,000 items. Certainly nothing to sneeze at, but still about 10 grand short of mine.
My next thought was to just straight up ask Flickr: who has the largest Photostream?
Hello Eli,
Thank you for contacting Flickr Customer Care.
I am very sorry but at this time, we can’t release this sort of data.
Thank you for your interest in Flickr.
If you have any other questions, please feel free to reply to this email.
Thank you again for contacting us.
Regards,Araceli
Flickr Customer Care
They can’t release that sort of data? Why not? I mean, there was a virtual pissing contest to see who had the largest Twitter Following, so I asked them why they can’t release that sort of data.
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Flickr Member Support.
I have escalated your email to a senior representative in
an effort to obtain the best answer. We are currently
experiencing a very high volume of requests. We would like
to apologize and inform you that it might take a little
longer than usual for us to respond to your question.If you have any other questions, please feel free to reply to this email.
Thank you again for contacting us.
Regards,
Flickr Member Support
They escalated my email to a senior representative? Wow. Maybe this was a bigger deal than I thought; they might actually divulge their secrets! So I waited a few days and got this response.
Hello elisfanclub,
Thank you for contacting Flickr Member Support.
Due to privacy reasons we can’t release this sort of data.
Thank you for your interest in Flickr. If you have any other questions, please feel free to reply to this email.
Regards,
Marcela
Oh, come on! They “escalated my email” and then that’s all I got? For crying out loud! Why couldn’t the first person just tell me that? Sheesh!
Then a friend of mine had a good idea. What if I ask a more direction question? What if I ask if *I* have the largest Flickr Photostream? So I did, and this is what I got back.
Hello elisfanclub,
Unfortunately we are not able to make that kind of statement.
But we truly appreciate you choosing Flickr for sharing your photos.
Thank you again for contacting us.
Regards,
Marcela
They can’t make that kind of statement?! What a weird thing to say. Is this classified information? What are they afraid of, Photostream envy? I’m just a curious person, and I thought this would be a simple question / answer sort of thing, but Flickr had to go and make it a bigger deal than it needed to be. So, I’m gonna rally the troops.
Attention Fellow Flickrites!
This is an official call to the Flickrverse to find the largest Photostream. Leave your comments here if you find any account with more than 24,000 items (photos & videos). If Flickr won’t help us, let’s help ourselves.
Filed under: general , flickr, photostream
Reading your post made wonder also, if you go to flickr and do a user search and include ‘flickr’ as the search criteria for ‘interests’ then this guy comes out tops >
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rccandidphotos/
289,042 items and counting!
I tried it using a few different keywords and nobody else came close.
Thanks for the info, Ray. And to think that I thought that I was anywhere NEAR the top of the list. HA! That’s amazing. Over a quarter of a million photos.
Hi
I was wondering the same question as you. A frined of mine was conviced that I must have had one of the largest portfolios on flickr with alomost 18,000, but I didn’t because I had seen photostreams over 100K. A while ago I am sure about 6 months ago I read an article about the biggest photostreams that showed a way to search users by stream size, but I can’t find it anymore. At that time I think I was not even ranked in the top 500 largest streams.
I did a bit of playing around with searches today and found that there are indeed a lot of huge photostreams in the hundreds of thousands. The largest one I could find was 362,000. Just go to seach and select “People” then click “Interests” and search for “photography” or anything else. even search for single letters, eg.
“a” or “e” and you will find some huge ones.
Cheers
Craig
Thanks for the input, Craig.
Wow, 362,000 is huge! I thought I was up there at 65,000 photos!
I was pretty shocked too, especially because I thought that I had a big photostream and I only have 25,000.
Yeah, some people are pretty intense about uploading pics. I’m always trying to decide whether i should upload only my “share publicly” good ones from each set, or if i should take the time to upload the entire roll of photos “for archiving” – what do you think?
Since you’re in Antarctica, what’s the bandwidth like? Can you freely upload pics? Is it easy to blog and stay connected, or are you out of touch? What kind of access do you have? Do you have your own computer or what?