14 DAY TRIAL // Photos are one of the biggest draws for Facebook, despite all the talk about connections, social graphs and what have you. People like to view their friends' photos and they love to upload their own. Yet, until very recently, the photo section of the site left much to be desired. Last year, Facebook said this will all change, several big improvements were introduced.
But what was supposed to take one month has now stretched to more than three, for example the new light box photo viewer is only now starting to be rolled out 'en masse.'
More people are now seeing the revamped viewer and it looks like it's will be a short amount of time until everyone gets it. But they'll get something else as well, the new photo viewer also carries ads, as All Facebook reports.
This isn't a totally new revelation, ads were visible in the screen shots Facebook provided when it introduced the feature, but it's now that people are seeing them in the wild that they are taking notice.
Of course, there are ads next to the current photo pages, like most other pages on Facebook, so, in practice, it's not much of a change. In fact, the light box photo viewer only has one ad, below the photo on the right, as opposed to regular pages.
The Photos section, despite its popularity was in dire need of a revamp. Facebook now supports much higher resolution photos than before, they were limited to just 720 pixels until recently. Now, users can upload photos as big as 2048 pixels wide.
And the new light box photo viewer, which is now finally being rolled out wider, comes in very handy for displaying the new, larger photos. It's snappier as well, Facebook says, so flipping through an album should be faster. It's unclear what caused the delay, but it seems that everyone is getting the new photo viewer soon.