Monday, August 26, 2013

Facebook to add shared photo albums as a feature




Facebook is introducing a new feature that lets multiple users upload pictures to the same shared photo album. When users create a new photo album, they'll have the option to "add contributors" with a new button on the upper left hand corner of the page. The original creator of the photo album can add up to 50 contributors, each of whom can upload up to 200 photos to one album. There's also new privacy settings, letting the album creator share with just their contributors, the contributors' Friends, or the public at large.

"INSPIRED BY USER FEEDBACK"

The feature is desktop only for now and rolling out slowly to a small group of English users at first, but Facebook engineers said that they would work to add even more functionality, such as increasing the 200-photo limit per contributor and adding mobile support. The new feature was built by about a dozen Facebook engineers during one of the company's internal "hackathons," according to Mashable, and was inspired by user feedback. It's unclear for now if any of the new features with incorporate or crossover to Facebook's other big photo app, Instagram.

Facebook engineers said when building the feature, they were looking to solve the problem of users having to create multiple albums of the same party or shared event. If that sounds a bit familiar, it should, as a number of companies have tried to crack the problem of group photo album creation, most infamously Color, the disastrously unpopular iOS app that sold to Apple last year for a reported fraction of its seed money. Other more promising startups have sprung up since then, including Albumatic. But Facebook is already the single largest online photo storage website the world, so with it getting into the game of collaborative albums, the future of such startups is murky to say the least.

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