Facebook Makes Photo Album Browsing Easier
The great thing about popular social networking site Facebook is that you can share images with your friends and loved ones. The bad thing about the social networking site is that sharing large photo albums can prove to be a big pain in the unmentionables. To locate a particular image you would have to click, click, and click some more until you would get to the page where that image is.
Let’s say you had a photo albums that contained some 200 images for example. Until now you could only view 20 images at a time since Facebook photo albums would display only 20 photos per page. If you wanted to locate an image, you would have to click “Next Page” over and over again.
Because browsing images page-by-page does not exactly make for a great user experience, Facebook decided to do something about it. Now you no longer have to click to move from one photo album page to another – images now load automatically as you scroll down.
“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. This new photo browsing experience is one of a series of improvements we're making to browsing, uploading and tagging photos. We've already increased the size of photos. We've also added face detection to make it easier to tag photos on your home page and throughout the site,” explained User Interface Engineer with Facebook, Stefan Parker.
This is similar to what Google did with Image Search. This July Google revamped Image Search and instant scrolling was among the changes it implemented. Instant scrolling means that you no longer have to press the “Next” button. Up to 1,000 images and several results pages are presented in one convenient scrolling page. Simply scroll down and you will move from search results page 1 to page 2, then page 3 and so on. You’ll know on which page you are because Google displays an unobtrusive page number in the left hand side.
Getting back to Facebook, here’s how photo albums used to look and how they look now.
Let’s say you had a photo albums that contained some 200 images for example. Until now you could only view 20 images at a time since Facebook photo albums would display only 20 photos per page. If you wanted to locate an image, you would have to click “Next Page” over and over again.
Because browsing images page-by-page does not exactly make for a great user experience, Facebook decided to do something about it. Now you no longer have to click to move from one photo album page to another – images now load automatically as you scroll down.
“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. This new photo browsing experience is one of a series of improvements we're making to browsing, uploading and tagging photos. We've already increased the size of photos. We've also added face detection to make it easier to tag photos on your home page and throughout the site,” explained User Interface Engineer with Facebook, Stefan Parker.
This is similar to what Google did with Image Search. This July Google revamped Image Search and instant scrolling was among the changes it implemented. Instant scrolling means that you no longer have to press the “Next” button. Up to 1,000 images and several results pages are presented in one convenient scrolling page. Simply scroll down and you will move from search results page 1 to page 2, then page 3 and so on. You’ll know on which page you are because Google displays an unobtrusive page number in the left hand side.
Getting back to Facebook, here’s how photo albums used to look and how they look now.
