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This article is from February 13, 2012, and is no longer current.

Facebook Gives Photographers Better Viewing Experience

If you’ve looked at photos on Facebook pages recently, you may have noticed that the viewing experience is a little different. This week, Facebook has been rolling out a new interface for viewing photographs that vastly improves how photos appear on screen. Once the change hits your account, you’ll see that clicking on a photo in your album opens a second window that floats the image on a grayed-out window with text appearing on the right side.
Instead of scrolling below the photo for comments as in the old version, comments are readily viewed next to the picture. As comments are added, the right-hand text bar scrolls, leaving the photo clearly visible on the screen. No need to hop back and forth to add comments or review the image in question as before. Advertising appears under the comments but also moves down the page as user-generated text multiplies. (Don’t want to see the ads? Then tell your friends to start commenting!)
While the old image viewer may not have been an issue for the average Facebook users who post snaps of family and friends, advanced photographers who use the social networking site to showcase their work found it limiting. The new lightbox-like interface is more in step with the needs of professional photographers, many of whom use applications with a similar look, such as Adobe Lightroom. Isolated against a neutral background, the images appear larger with better contrast.
According to Facebook, the user experience is front and center as an impetus for change. Facebook UI Engineer Stefan Parker addressed users in a note entitled “Developing Facebook’s New Photo Viewer”. He wrote, “While Photos is one of the most core experiences on Facebook, with over 100 million photos uploaded per day, it’s supported by some of the oldest code in the system and was in dire need of an upgrade.” He also cited slow image loading, multiple tabbed windows, and cumbersome comment scrolling as incentives for the update.
Parker continued, “By redesigning the Photo Viewer, users now view over 5% more photos, equating to an increase in roughly a billion photo views every day.”

But another, unstated reason for the new look is the altered landscape for photo-heavy social networking sites. Facebook is responding to the growing number of photographers who have shown preference for Google+, which already had a lightbox-like interface that supports larger images. Facebook is also competing with photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and other social-media services catering to photographers.
Photographer Thomas Hawk, an early tester of the Facebook update, wrote on his site, “It’s still not as good as Google+’s which still has a larger photo — but along with the new much larger photo thumbnails in the Timeline view, it’s a step in the right direction.”
Read this review from DPreview.com comparing Facebook and Google+ in terms of image viewing.
Have you noticed the changes in Facebook’s photo-viewer? What do you think?
 

  • BinkieBee says:

    The Photo Viewer two versions ago was better than this latest one. It was faster, it had a larger black background, it didn’t have the overlying “Like” and other buttons appearing right on the bottom of the picture, AND it didn’t have ADS.

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