Facebook Plans New Photo Pages

In the last few years photos and images have emerged as some of the strongest ways of connecting people. From Facebook to Tumblr to the recent rise of Pinterest, it’s obvious that looking at and sharing photos online has become a global pastime.

While most people think of Facebook as a social network rather than a photo-sharing site, the statistics don’t lie. With over 300 million photos uploaded every day (some say it’s closer to 350 million) Facebook is the biggest photo-sharing site in the world. To put that in context, there are almost as many photos uploaded to Facebook in a day as there are Tweets sent on Twitter.

Facebook’s billion dollar acquisition of Instagram showed how serious they are when it comes to their place in the photo sharing world but, I believe, their further growth in the area has been hampered with a problem of how they are displayed.

Through the various evolutions of Facebook they have tried many ways of highlighting photos. On profiles they launched with simply the profile photo, then moving to the photo strip, then to the profile / cover photo combination. Their move to a lightbox / overlay style when you click on photos was a little jarring but eventually we took to it. The hi-res and full screen options were a welcome addition.

However, none of this has hidden the fact that when you actually go to browse photos, it’s pretty dull looking.

All this is about to change. On Monday Facebook posted an article in their Newsroom entitled “A More Beautiful View of Photos” and, I think you can agree, things are looking up.

Not only will users have a better view of theirs and their friend’s photos, they will be able to pick and choose which photos they want to highlight – see the bigger photos below. Personally I think it’s a shame that they’re still square shaped, Pinterest and Google+ have show us all how beautiful it looks when you dynamically tile pictures in square, vertical and horizontal, but how or never, perhaps it’s something that will happen down the line. It’s certainly a leap in the right direction.

They have already started rolling out the this new format though it’s not clear when users in the UK and Ireland will be getting it.

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