Walt Disney World is a lot of things.
It’s fun.
It’s memorable.
It’s pretty expensive.
It’s also photogenic.
It’s a series of theme parks and resorts that were carefully designed to look as beautiful
as possible.
With millions of guests wanting to capture their vacation memories every year it is one
of the most photographed vacation destinations.
And while most of those photos are taken by the guests themselves, Disney also does plenty
of the photographing.
All of their parks are staffed with official photographers who will snap your photo for
Disney’s Photopass, a service that lets you have the photos taken for free before
you decide to either buy them a la carte or altogether with Disney’s Memory Maker.
On top of that, 13 of the rides at Disney World have on-ride photos that you can choose
to buy if you want.
I wanted to find out, between all of the Photopass photographers and all of the ride photos,
just how many pictures Disney was taking at their resort every single day and how much
data that amounted to.
Obviously a number like this is not going to be exact.
The parks run for different hours on different days.
Rides break down.
Crowds fluctuate.
Short of Disney offering a specific number, which they’ll probably never do, all we
can do is estimate or use the ranges that Disney does offer.
Now according to Disney themselves, Photopass photographers across the resort on any given
day take between 100,000 and 200,000 photos.
As for ride photos, I’ll dig into the breakout, but my best estimation is that Disney on an
average day is taking nearly 67,000 ride photos, meaning that depending on the crowds, Disney
could be collectively taking as many as over a quarter of a million photographs per day.
Let’s break down those numbers.
The Photopass photographer one is pretty straightforward.
That’s the number Disney provides, so there wasn’t much guesswork there.
As for the on-ride photos, I had to do some digging and make some assumptions.
Disney is particular about when they share any given ride’s guest capacity, so in many
instances I had to find some estimations that were made by timing the ride itself.
From there I used the number of guests in each ride vehicle and how many photos are
taken per ride vehicle to work out an estimate of how many photos are taken on that ride
in an hour.
So for instance, Test Track is said to have a capacity of 1200 guests per hour.
Each ride vehicle sits six guests, and the ride takes one photo per vehicle.
That would come out to 200 ride photos an hour.
So on a 12-hour long park day, that’s 2,400 Test Track photos.
For a ride like Space Mountain we have to account for the fact that there are two tracks,
or that Seven Dwarfs Mine Train has two separate photo moments during the ride.
There are thirteen attractions in total that take on-ride photos, with six in the Magic
Kingdom, two in Epcot, three in Hollywood Studios, and two in the Animal Kingdom.
The ride that takes the most would be the Haunted Mansion.
With an estimated guest capacity of around 2,400 guests an hour, and 2-3 guests per Doombuggy,
that’d come out to between 900 to 1200 photos per hour, or up to 14,400 ride photos in a
12-hour day.
On the other end of that spectrum is Epcot’s Frozen Ever After.
With an estimated guest capacity of 1000 guests per hour, and 12-16 people per boat, Frozen
Ever After would be taking between 62 to 83 photos per hour, which would amount to between
744 and 996 photos per 12-hour day.
Again, there are a lot of assumptions and estimations that needed to be made.
Sometimes parks are open for 14 hours, and other times 10 hours.
With some rides, a slow day might mean pulling a few ride vehicles off the track which lowers
guest capacity.
So obviously take this all with a grain of salt, but assuming a 12-hour day running at
estimated capacities, it would mean nearly 67,000 ride photos taken every single day.
That’s one to two photos being taken any given second the parks are open.
That’s a lot of photos, and those photos need to be stored somewhere.
Figuring out how much space all those pictures take up required just as much estimating,
since Disney doesn’t release any of that information.
To do so, I went back and downloaded every Photopass photo I had tied to my account since
last April.
I looked at file size averages for both regular park Photopass photos as well as ride photos.
I found that park photos, at their largest resolution, amounted to an average 3.2 megabytes,
with a range of 1.3mb to 5.8mb.
At one-hundred to two-hundred thousand photos per day, that would come out to 320 to 640
gigabytes of photos per day.
The on-ride photos, interestingly enough, had a slightly higher average at 4.8mb per
photo, but a much wider range.
Frozen Ever After averaged at 11mb per photo, and Dinosaur and Pirates of the Caribbean
photos averaged at over 9mb.
This kind of makes sense.
These are rides with one photo that covers a ride vehicle with anywhere from 12-21 guests.
So you’d expect a higher resolution so that guests could see themselves better.
On the low end I found that all of my Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin photos were closer
to 1mb.
Sticking with the average, and applying it to the average number of ride photos a day,
we would be looking at another 323gb of photos per day.
That means that combined with the photopass photos, Disney would be taking anywhere from
643 to 963 gigabytes of photos every single day.
Now consider, for a moment, that the photos taken are held on a guest’s account for
45 days before they expire, so that they have time to get home from their vacation before
making any purchase decisions.
That rolling 45-day storage would mean that on any given day Disney would be holding on
to anywhere between 7.5 and 12 million photographs, amounting to between 29 and 43 terabytes of data.
Of course, none of this accounts for the fact that annual passholders have their photopass
photos stored for a full year before they expire.
Unfortunately without any estimates as to how many passholders there are, and how many
photos the average passholder has taken at the parks, estimating that one would be a
total shot in the dark.
In any case, I think the moral of the story is that Disney takes a lot of photos.