By now, you’ve heard about Facebook having the largest photo library on the web, or at least, you’ve seen the graphic, but have you heard how powerful and viable Reddit has made the Imgur.com image hosting site? If not, you might be surprised by how large Imgur has grown.

While Imgur is not quite as big as Flickr, at least in regards to Alexa, its frequent use in the Reddit community has catapulted the image hosting service into the top 50 sites in the United States, but the numbers go quite a bit farther than that. In the thread that brought this information to light, a link goes to Imgur’s statistics page, and the results are pretty eye-opening.

The graphic, which leads this post, indicates that Imgur boasts the following:

• 8,701,524 images uploaded a month
• 7,831,159,587 images viewed a month
• 1196577471303.7 megabytes of bandwidth used a month

For those who don’t like to convert large numbers into smaller ones, that, as the post title informs us, is over a Petabyte of bandwidth a month, or just in case large numbers are your thing, a quadrillion bytes, or, 1000 terabytes. That’s a whopping amount of bandwidth going to entertain the Reddit masses, but it also shows just how popular images are with the Reddit crowd.

Then there’s all the Tumblr/RSS Reader sharing of the Imgur-hosted images, which helps propel the service to such a respectable heights. As indicated, the Alexa rankings for Imgur are quite strong. In fact, Imgur is actually a more popular site than Reddit, with Imgur coming in at 42. Reddit, on the other hand, comes in at 45.

For comparison’s sake, Flickr ranks 26th, which stands to reason considering just how long Flickr’s popular service been around (Flickr launched in 2004). While the amount of images Imgur hosts in comparison to Flickr may not be equal–Flickr recently announced its 6 billionth image–Imgur does experience almost 9 million uploads a month, and considering it was launched five years after Flickr, it’s easy to quantify Imgur’s exponential growth.

For further comparison’s sake, Imgur is more popular than Photobucket and Google’s Picasa, services that have been around a lot longer than Imgur. Granted, nothing comes close to Facebook’s massive array of image uploads–almost 100 billion images in Facebook’s photo database–but the fact that essentially one site, Reddit, made Imgur what it is today deserves notice.

Funny, I don’t remember Digg making a new image hosting service explode like that.