Faceboook Announces An Upgrade To The Photo Viewing And Sharing On Its Timeline

Facebook announced an upgrade to the photo-viewing experience on the social networking website. Even though changes to the image-viewing were introduced last year with the launch of Facebook timeline, this is seen as a welcome upgrade that will simply take the photo experience to a whole new level.

This upgrade, announced Monday, will make the photos appear larger when the user clicks on them. The developers have put in efforts to design an aesthetically pleasing grid for which square is the dominant shape but all the photos appear to be of a different size; some smaller, some larger. Photos which have been "liked" by the user will appear larger as compared to the others. There will also be a star option on top of the photos, which if clicked on will "favorite," the photo. This option comes in handy when the user is showing photos to someone and only wants to show the best or most favorite pictures from the lot. Mashable reported that when these pictures on the timeline are clicked on, they will fill up the screen.

Facebook is said to have put so much emphasis on photos because of the increasing popularity of Pinterest, one of its competitors. Facebook already bought photo-app Instagram for $1 billion and has formed its new photo-app called Facebook Camera, but the competition from Pinterest remains. It can be said that the grid, the concept of photos filling up the screen and the entire photo viewing experience with the new upgrade to Facebook photo strives for a photo viewing option similar to that of Pinterest.

The announcement came yesterday in a press release on the Facebook blog. Emily Grewal, a product manager at Facebook said that the user could now use the Menu to find shots he/she is tagged in, pictures that the user has shared and the albums that the user has created.

Even though the upgrade was announced on Monday, like all the other new features on Facebook, it will be a while till it is active across the world. One of Facebook's representatives told Mashable that this change in the photo-viewing experience will only be seen by the users of Facebook on their desktops and notebooks and there are not by the users of Facebook's mobile apps.