Los Angeles — In an attempt to visually attract its users, popular social-networking outfit Facebook on Thursday announced two new enhancements to its photo viewer, including high-resolution photos and full screen viewing.
Unfortunately, for now the latest function only works on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. The company asserts that photos will display as much as four times bigger on a large desktop monitor.
Now, to enjoy the latest functionality, simply click on a photo, and the photo viewer will automatically display photos in the highest resolution possible. This can be up to four times as big as before the update, and you can also expand the photo viewer to take up your entire computer screen. To use it, simply click the arrows at the top-right corner of a photo to expand it.
Here is how Facebook’s Ryan Mack, who initiated the photo-viewer-improving project as part of a “Hackamonth,” describes the issue:
The internet standard color profile is called “sRGB.” Every photo on Facebook and most of the internet uses the sRGB profile. For some reason most web browsers don’t assume the image is sRGB, and you actually have to redefine sRGB in every single image. Our photos software was already quite capable of defining sRGB in every image, but that definition was pretty big, and turning it on would have slowed down page loading.
The standard sRGB definition was 3KB. That’s not a big deal for large images, but our thumbnails in newsfeed and timeline are pretty small. Adding the standard definition can slow down loading by up to 30%. Now my quest had become making the sRGB definition smaller.
So they did. You can read more about how at the Facebook Engineering blog.
These superb changes to Facebook’s photo-sharing interface suggest that the company is responding to growing competition from sites like Pinterest and Instagram and from Google+, which includes a full-screen photo viewer, according to Patrick Moorhead, the principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
“This is absolutely a defensive tactic to thwart off any advances that either Instagram or Pinterest will make,” Moorhead said. User appreciate how Google+ handles photographs, he said.
On the other hand, Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner, said the action would bring Facebook “up to speed” with rival photo-sharing services. Its previous photo viewer “seemed to be kind of a tacky addition to what is otherwise a nicely laid out service,” he said.
However, he considers the alterations as part of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to keep users on its platform for longer.
“Google, Facebook and Apple are all striving to expand their own feature sets so they can keep users on their sites,” he said. “It is competition, but not over photo sharing per se.”
In fact, you can probably noticed, Facebook’s photo viewer has gone through a bit of a redesign over the last couple of months.
Besides, the latest update truly shines and focuses essentially on image quality, and the full-size photos look great. Users can upload photographs with a maximum resolution of 2048-by-2048 pixels.