Q: What's the biggest photo sharing site on the planet?

...with 249,999,457 being arms-length pictures of pre-teen girls preening for the camera.

The remainder being kitten pics.

Good luck finding specific images using Facebook's search feature. Google doesn't know anything about them either if they're posted on Facebook even if you make them public.

I have uploaded photos I've taken of interesting places around my town anyone can spot in a bike ride. And right after I posted 16 of them I got an immediate "Like" from two people and those two people had automatic email alerts whenever my FB "Wall" changed first established from when we hooked up during a class reunion. No one else has commented or "Liked" ever since and Googling them doesn't show anything.

Do we really have to believe everything we read on the internet even if it appears to come from an authoritative and professional looking site?

Yes we do. It's the Internet and good looking authoritative sites are never wrong. Ask Wikipedia.

Facebook may suck as a photo sharing site, but what if they were to flex their muscles a little. The referenced article suggests they might be getting a little more serious about the photography aspect of the site, "arms-length pictures of pre-teen girls preening for the camera" notwithstanding.

With 250 million photos a day, what they really need is an "it doesn't suck" algorithm to sort them out a bit. There must be 1 or 2 good ones, just by random chance.

Personally I don't like Facebook but I use it for my website updates. I prefer Google+, but traffic there is a lot lighter.

Correct me if i am wrong, but if you post a photo on pacebook arent you signing the right to that image away?

You're wrong. The details of the rights you license to them are found in their terms of service, etc.

You mean these ...

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy andapplication settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

Peter

While it's there on the site you are. You are giving them a "...non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook..."

That pretty much means they can do anything with it that they want to while it's still on the site. The rights are "transferable" and "sub-licensable" so Facebook can pass it on to whoever they want to. The old terms of service had "irrevocable" in there too, but they seem to have changed that.

I don't know what happens if they transfer the rights and sub-license your content before you remove it from Facebook. You're probably screwed.

This link compares Google+ and Facebook:
http://photography.about.com/od/copyrightinformation/a/facebookvsgoogleplusphotolicensing.htm

I guess the bright side is the more schlock snap shooter pics that flood Facebook and what comes up in a Google image search starts to make our shots here at Photo.net look like masterpieces.

Now if we can just find a way to sort them all out in an organized fashion. Probably gonna' need lots of coffee to make that happen.

Buried in oblivion.

There's a fair proportion of mid teen girls screaming into the camera too. My daughter must post more photos to FB than I do to all photo sites these days