San Francisco — Social networking colossus Facebook, on Thursday announced some significant upgrades to its photo-sharing product: the ability to share high-resolution photos, “tag” people in bulk, and browse photos in a more streamlined fashion that does not load individual pages each time a new photo is viewed.
The improvements was communicated by Facebook Photos product manager Sam Odio, and the new capabilities will be released over the next month, currently under test with a small group.
Until now, much of Facebook Photos had been “a clumsy experience,” Odio explained and users could only upload photos at 720 pixels on the largest edge. Now, Facebook has increased that metric by eight times to 2,048 pixels, which also can be downloaded and printed, Odio said in a blog post Thursday.
With millions of photos uploaded to the social network every day, Facebook did not considers its existing product was sufficient. “Reliability is extremely important to us,” Odio said. “The biggest problem in other countries, where you are talking about slower computers and slower Internet connections: they were really struggling to upload photos to Facebook.”
These enhancements include hi-res photos, photo-download links, bulk tagging options and an exquisite lightbox interface for viewing images from anywhere on the site. The lightbox in particular reminds us of similar features recently rolled out by Flickr; and some of these improvements, such as hi-res and downloading capabilities, are what have prevented Facebook from serious competition with Flickr as a photo-sharing destination.
Of late, Facebook photos were best for snapping memories of places, people and events through small images and mobile snapshots; however, these changes will now unfold a whole new class of image-sharing, up to and including photography, modeling and graphic design portfolios. The latest uploading tools, which have gradually been streamlined with more advanced Flash technology, will give Facebook members the option to upload a photo in 2048-pixel resolution and offer their friends the chance to download them.
With its 500 million users around the world, Facebook is now poised to take over the photo-sharing market. “It is enough pixels to print out a 5×7 print at 300 DPI,” Odio described. Then, when they have uploaded them, they will be able to tag their friends in them in bulk rather than individually.
Facebook also made viewing photos more convenient, using the “light box” design motif that some photo apps and services use. The light box device blackens the other elements on the page, and empowers the user to quickly slide back and forth between pictures, which open in the box at the top of the page.
The new look for Facebook photo viewing, which does not require a new page to be loaded each time a new photo is selected. (Credit: Facebook)
“This is not face recognition,” he insisted. “Picasa and iPhoto — they will detect a face and say, ‘This is Sam,’ and they will suggest that it is Sam. We are not doing that. We are not linking any faces to profiles automatically. Right now, we want to stay away from that because it is a very touchy subject.”
The site will also empowers users to tag more than one photo of an event at once. “When people upload a set of photos, they are often of events like weddings and birthday parties where people are with the same group of friends and family,” Odio wrote. “With our new uploader, you will be able to tag multiple photos in the same album all at once, as well as tag photos of the same person with a lot less effort.”
Finally, in what Odio calls the “least noticeable improvement,” the photo uploader has been rewritten, with the new version “less likely to crash,” he says.