Facebook is
the biggest photo-sharing, or rather photo-hosting site in the world easily surpassing dedicated sites like Flickr, Picasa or Photobucket. With 400 million users, the social network can conquer a market even if it isn't actually competing in it. However, the photo management, specifically the upload process, leaves a lot to be desired as the whole process is slow and a little buggy. This will soon change though, Facebook says, as it has begone to roll out a brand-new photo uploader which has been in
testing for the past couple of months or so.
"Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site with over 2.5 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month. In order to make sharing photos even easier, today we are announcing a new and improved photo uploader," Facebook's Chris Putnam
writes.
"Recently we've received feedback that people struggle with our current photo uploader due to various technical issues, while others are confused by the installation process. In this new version of the photo uploader, we have solved many of those problems and developed a fast, stable and simple experience for sharing photos on Facebook," he explained.
So far so good, a faster and simpler experience can only be a good thing so kudos to Facebook for admitting their faults and rectifying them. The current uploader relies on ActiveX controls (for Internet Explorer) or a Java applet (for everything else) giving users a lot of headaches. So what exactly is this magical new photo uploader which solves every problem? Why it's a plugin, just like Java or Active X, to a degree. Facebook figured, what better way to fix the issues with plugins than by building one ourselves.
Facebook has started rolling out the new uploader and it should be coming to everyone within a few weeks. When you want to upload a photo, you'll be asked if you want to install the photo uploader
plugin. Facebook says that this shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. What it doesn't say is that the plugin is only available for Firefox, 3.5 mind you, not
the latest 3.6 as Facebook says it has disabled it in 3.6 due to a security vulnerability, for Google Chrome but only on Windows and very recently it has been made available for Internet Explorer 7 and above.
Granted, if you can get it to work, it's a rather powerful tool. It allows you to browse through your computer from inside the app and also shows previews of the local photos. After you're finished with your selection, the uploader has another neat trick up its sleeve as you can navigate away from the page, or even leave Facebook altogether, and the photos will continue to be uploaded in the background. Hopefully, Facebook will widen its browser support soon enough so more people can take advantage of the tool.
Even better, once HTML5 start picking up steam and gets more browser support as well, Facebook will drop the plugin system and build the same functionality using the proposed standard. Almost everything the new uploader does can be done with
HTML5. With the File API, you could brows local folders, see thumbnails of the photos on your drive and also do asynchronous uploads. The only caveat would be that you couldn't leave the page but that isn't exactly a major drawback.
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