Superstorm Sandy sees Instagram set new record

Hurricane Sandy, and Instagram photos tagged with #sandy, “was probably the single largest event taking place that was captured on Instagram,” said CEO Kevin Systrom. Speaking at the GigaOm Roadmap conference, Systrom also said that this may be “the single largest thing captured through digital images ever. Over 800,000 images were simply tagged with #sandy. Imagine how many total images were taken on the East Coast during this period of time.”

For a comparison, the recent Super Bowl delivered only 85 000 images on Instagram. Then if you consider and include tags such as #hurricanesandy and #frankenstorm, the amount of uploads jumps up to 1.3-million.

It may seem insignificant against the amount of photos that Facebook users upload (around 300-million images a day), yet Facebook images are predominantly “people orientated”. This highlights one key way in which Instagram differs from Facebook.

Currently Instagram has more than 100-million users, and it all just started from a single smartphone app.

Twitter has been the most used social network regarding Sandy, with approximately 20-million hurricane-related tweets between 27 October and 1 November. There is no indication of how many of these tweets included photos however. Sandy was also the second most popular US subject on Facebook during that time.

One thing that has not been made clear is how many of these Instagram photos are genuine or not, as many uploaded images on social networks were fake.

Image: pocket-lint