I didn't meant to say that PBs of image data is common place - we had no image that approached that size - but people outside the domain of microscope scan results might be unfamiliar with just how chonky these image files would get traditionally.
It isn't just a giant database of small files and metadata blindly feeding a recommender system.
Several petabytes is definitely a staggering amount of data in that context of being analyzed by human eyes to extract some scientific value.