Digital photography has taken off in a big way. Digital cameras are getting better each year. It is easier than ever to scan and convert old photos into digital format. Reasonably good digital cameras are affordable. Cell phones are often equipped with built-in digital cameras and they are getting better as we speak. The revolution in digital photography is having a huge impact on the Web and is a big chunk of what Web users and business people share among each other. Digital photos and digital videos is the kind of digital content that requires a lot of disk space to host and a lot of computing power to deliver.

Digital photos uploaded to the Web each day are in volumes few of us can imagine. There is demand for online digital photo storage. Backup of photos, management and online photo publishing and sharing are the most common features. techcrunch.com recently reported flickr.com reached the milestone of having 2 billion photos uploaded. Hypothetically speaking, if each photo is on average 50k in size then approximately 95 thousand gigabytes of disk space is necessary to store those 2 billion photos.

The disk space necessary to store digital photos may seem huge, but that is nothing compared to the storage necessary to host videos. Similar to the hypothetical example above if each video clip hosted on youtube.com is on average 10MB in size then more than 100 thousand gigabytes are necessary to store 11 million videos (result of a primitive “the” search).

This gigantic requirement of storage space is only a glimpse of the amount of information the future holds and there is a reason why concepts and technologies such as cloud computing, low cost datacenters and portable datacenters are getting more attention. These technologies will be the backbone of the world’s future digital content.