Facebook currently has more than 240 billion pictures, and they're taking up too much space.
And with 315 million more photos added every day, the social media giant needs a new way to start storing all the data.
"Facebook has more than one billion users…so we are coming to this problem sooner than other people, but as more and more people have connected lives…finding ways to store data with greater efficiency is going to be important to everyone," Facebook communications manager Michael Kirkland told CNBC.
The company will begin moving older photos that are not accessed often to "cold storage" at high efficiency data storage centers, which will be as much as five times more energy efficient.
"There will be almost no user impact. I qualify that at saying that we are still in the process of developing this," said Kirkland. "The idea here is to find a way to store backups or older photos that don't see any activity and to back up in a way that is very energy efficient and won't impact users."
Most cold storage systems are meant for huge amounts of data that don't need to be accessed often. These systems are not used for storing photos that are meant to be accessed quickly, like on Facebook, so retrieval times are very high. Facebook's cold storage will be used as backup for old photos, so if a data center server isn't working, and a user attempts to access an old photo, the cold storage system will access the image.
"From Facebook's perspective, when a user goes to a Facebook to see an old photo, it shouldn't take five minutes to pull up," said Kirkland. "It has to be there with almost no delay, so we're engineering the best of both worlds' solutions."
Facebook is currently planning two of these cold storage centers, one in Prineville, Oregon and another still being constructed in Forest City, North Carolina. The company also owns two additional data centers in its Oregon location.
