14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is by far the largest photo host on the web. With billions of photos already and millions more added all the time, they’re a big part of the site. The social network’s engineers have been focusing more on this section of the site recently and have now released a new photo album page which lists hundreds of photos at a time.
“We decided to make navigating photo albums simpler, easier and more fun. Now, a photo album will automatically display additional photos as you scroll down a single page. You no longer need to click ‘Next’ or try to guess which page number will reveal the best photos,” Stefan Parker, a user interface engineer at Facebook announced.
“Before this latest change, photo albums would display 20 photos per page. Now instead of waiting for pages to load, you're enjoying more photos of your friends and family. You can see as many as 200 right away in an album,” he explained.
Taking a page out of Google Image Search’s playbook, which itself was inspired by Bing Image Search, the Facebook photo album now feature ‘infinite scroll’. You no longer have to go through the tens of pages the larger albums may have.
As many as 200 photos are displayed at a time making large albums, like holiday photo albums, a lot easier to navigate. Facebook was able to introduce this because it doesn’t load all of the photos at once, just the ones it is currently displaying. As you scroll down, more thumbnails are loaded from the Facebook servers.
The thumbnails themselves are larger than before so you can get a better idea of what the photo looks like without clicking on it. The photos' size has also been increased rather recently, they are now 720 pixels wide as opposed to 604 pixels as before.
Facebook also introduced face detection technologies as well as better tagging and a new photo uploader in recent months, to improve the overall experience.