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Statistics and Calculations on How Many Images Imgur Hosts
Aug 7, 2015Web and InternetComments (0)
Curious how many images and files Imgur hosts? Some public information is available in the Imgur AMA and Imgur wiki, but it doesn't contain information specifically on how many files Imgur has in its archives currently.
Imgur uses both 5-digit and 7-digit case-sensitive alphanumeric IDs for posts. Changing the case of any alphabetic character will result in a different ID, so each digit has a full 62 different possibilities (a-z, A-Z, 0-9).
With 62 different possibilities per character, there are 916,132,832 possible combinations with 5-digit codes (62^5) and 3,521,614,600,000 possible combinations with 7-digit codes (62^7).
Using PHP CLI, I wrote a simple program that generates unique random 5-digit and 7-digit IDs using mt_rand and the 62 character set. It pings Imgur for a response for each code, and the response is stored. I ran separate tests for both 5-digit and 7-digit codes over sufficiently-large sample sizes to come up with a percentage of codes that are valid. I then applied that percentage to the total set of possible combinations to arrive at an approximation for the total number of images Imgur hosts.
For 5-digit codes:
For 7-digit codes:
In total Imgur hosts approximately 2,020,461,689 images, based on these calculations.
In the Imgur AMA from August 2012, MrGrim said the average image size was 200 KB. That may have increased since then, but going based on that size and the image count being 2,020,461,689, Imgur should be hosting about 385,372 GB (376 TB) worth of images currently.
Basic Information
Imgur uses both 5-digit and 7-digit case-sensitive alphanumeric IDs for posts. Changing the case of any alphabetic character will result in a different ID, so each digit has a full 62 different possibilities (a-z, A-Z, 0-9).
With 62 different possibilities per character, there are 916,132,832 possible combinations with 5-digit codes (62^5) and 3,521,614,600,000 possible combinations with 7-digit codes (62^7).
Testing Method
Using PHP CLI, I wrote a simple program that generates unique random 5-digit and 7-digit IDs using mt_rand and the 62 character set. It pings Imgur for a response for each code, and the response is stored. I ran separate tests for both 5-digit and 7-digit codes over sufficiently-large sample sizes to come up with a percentage of codes that are valid. I then applied that percentage to the total set of possible combinations to arrive at an approximation for the total number of images Imgur hosts.
Results
For 5-digit codes:
- Sample size: 10,275
- Found: 43.007299%
- 0.43007299 * 916,132,832 = 394,003,986 in use
For 7-digit codes:
- Sample size: 95,268
- Found: 0.046185%
- 0.00046185 * 3,521,614,600,000 = 1,626,457,703 in use
In total Imgur hosts approximately 2,020,461,689 images, based on these calculations.
Total Storage Space
In the Imgur AMA from August 2012, MrGrim said the average image size was 200 KB. That may have increased since then, but going based on that size and the image count being 2,020,461,689, Imgur should be hosting about 385,372 GB (376 TB) worth of images currently.