14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is unveiling a new shared photo album feature which will enable as many as 50 users to upload photos to the album as well as view what everyone else has posted.
The feature is designed particularly to make it easy to post photos from one event in a shared album.
Each of the contributors is limited to 200 pics, but that's still a maximum of 10,000 photos in the album, 10 times more than the regular limit.
The creators of the album can invite others and can allow others to invite even more contributors. Creators also get to choose the photos to keep and remove anything they don't like, while regular contributors can only manage their own photos.
"Right now, if you were at a party and there were three different albums created, you might not be able to see all the photos [based on privacy settings], which is kind of confusing and frustrating," Facebook's Bob Baldwin explained.
The albums can also be shared publicly, or only with contributors or friends of contributors. The feature only works on the desktop for now, but Facebook wants to bring it to mobile devices as well.
The shared photo albums feature was built during a Hackathon, so it can be considered a first step, as more functionality will be added in the future, including the possibility of increasing the 200-photo limit.
"I think one thing that's really fun about creating products at Facebook is that you're never quite sure how people will use the product in the end," Baldwin added. "We're really excited for launch because we think people will use [shared albums] in ways that we're not even thinking of."
As with most Facebook creations, the idea behind the feature is not new, as it's similar to Google+'s shared albums and to the services offered by several startups.