Two years later, Google+ is growing, with 540m active users worldwide, 1.5b photos uploaded each week

At a Google+ event in San Francisco, Google’s VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra took the stage to discuss the promise of the company’s social network. But before it began to talk about its future, Gundotra decided to share more about where it’s going now.

Now two years old, the social network has seen a new version published nearly every day — nearly 20 launches in the last 4 months such as sync’d notifications and translations.

So how is the social network doing? There are more than 540 million active users worldwide with 300 million active users in the stream alone. There are 1.5 billion photos being uploaded to Google+ too each week.

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Gundotra also spoke about a flurry of features including Hangouts and Photos. He mentioned that there would be 18 new features that will be released later on today. Among those updates include the Auto-Awesome for Videos tool, improved photo search and editing capabilities, and more.

Some may have been speculating before today whether there were any active users on Google+, but now we know the opposite to be true. Based on today’s revelations, it still has a user base much smaller than Facebook’s 1.15 billion, but definitely surpasses Twitter’s 218 million monthly active users.

What makes the recent metrics all the more interesting is that it further solidifies Google+’s relationship with the photography community, cementing its rivalry with Flickr and 500px. But has it surpassed Facebook’s 240 billion photos? It’s not entirely clear, but is doubtful given that it has only seen 1.5 billion photos uploaded each week for the past two years.