“We just couldn’t crunch those images down to a smaller size,” Zacharias remembers. “It would have taken a significant amount of Google’s entire processing powe

“We just couldn’t crunch those images down to a smaller size,” Zacharias remembers. “It would have taken a significant amount of Google’s entire processing power just to do that.” What? Processing a thumbnail is insignificant compared to processing a video - in fact it's on the same magnitude as making a single frame of video... Maybe Google uses a lot of hardware encoders for YouTube? In any case, I can't believe this is a reason. A billion images? Is nothing for Google. Google was offering a billion hours of cpu time to scientists for free in 2011. Don't tell me that a thumbnail takes an hour... http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/1-billion-computing-core-hours-for.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/1-billion-computing-c... Google App Engine now offers the Image Service, but perhaps that was launched after this. https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/images/overview https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/images/ove...