Most images downloaded from a website in 24 hours

The most pictures downloaded from a website was 950,000, by the visual artist Erik Kessels (the Netherlands) in preparation for the What's Next? photography exhibition held at Amsterdam's Foam gallery from 5 November 2011 to 7 December 2011. All of the print-outs were taken from the photo-sharing website Flickr and represented just one day’s worth of uploads to the site. Of the 950,000 images downloaded, 350,000 were printed out for the installation. The aim of the What's Next? exhibition was to provoke conversation about the future of photography. Visitors to the exhibition were encouraged to walk over the mountain of photographs and pick them up, which Kessels said could leave people feeling strange as "you're walking over personal memories". He said: "We consume images so fast nowadays, that I was wondering what it would look like if you physically printed off all the images that became available in a 24-hour period. When you're downloading them and you have one million images on a server, that's not impressive but when you print them out and put them all in one space, that's when it really overwhelms you." The artist also said he hoped the installation would show people "...how public your private photos have become. Before, you had your photo album and only your family and friends could look at. Now people all over the world can look at it if they find it. We're exposed to an overload of images nowadays. This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples' experiences." In total, more than six billion photos are hosted on Flickr. As of September 2011, Facebook was said to host 140 billion photos.