Facebook is finally making updates to Photos that will make the service much more useful and a lot less tedious. The three primary areas of improvement: high-resolution images, a better viewer, and a better uploader.
I’m excited to announce three big improvements to Photos: high-resolution images so you can store bigger pictures, a better viewer for browsing photos, and an simpler uploader when you have lots of images. The team has been working hard to get these done, and we’ll make these available to everyone over the next month.
Higher Resolution
Facebook is increasing the size of uploaded photos from 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest edge. This is an 8x increase overall. Back in the day, not many people had digital cameras and most mobile cameras were garbage. Now, you have cell phones taking photos at 8M (3264×2448 pixels). Posting these to Facebook used to kill the quality, but now you won’t take such a serious hit.
A Better Viewer
Browsing photos on Facebook is a pain. Clicking a photo anywhere on the site takes you to a completely different page, losing your place in the feed. Many users have previously resorted to opening multiple tabs so they could keep their place, but this is a less than ideal solution. Now, when you click photos, they pop up in a light box on top of the page you’re on. They’ve also rewritten all the code for the viewer from scratch, so paging through photos will be faster.
Better Uploads and Tagging
The Facebook uploader has been updated to use the latest Flash technology. This makes it more stable, reliable, and easier to use. It’s also a lot easier to tag photos. At a recent event, a friend took over 120 photos with their phone and uploaded and tagged them all on Facebook. I can’t imagine how much time that took. Now, it’s easier to tag multiple photos or photos of the same person using face recognition technology.
It looks like Facebook is making a serious play for your online photos. Given the volume of photos that they deal with on a daily basis, it’s no surprise. They even seem to throw a jab and competitors in this space, saying “and unlike on many other online services, you don’t need any kind of premium or paid account.”
Should Flickr and others be watching their backs?
via Facebook (8) | More Beautiful Photos, Inside Facebook