Yet another Facebook Photo upgrade

Facebook Photos has come a long way in the last six years. It is now one of Facebook’s most popular features and is well liked because of its ease of use and simplistic layout. But even great tools can be improved slightly so what has Facebook HQ come up with?

When you upload your photos you can choose to include a high quality version of the photo; this also allows you and anyone who can view the photo to save a print-ready version of the image.

It’s hard to know which came first, the high qulity photo option or the in-store print option at ASDA .

The timelines are blurry and many blogs and internet experts have predicted that to stay competitive the Photos application would have to incorporate a high quality option soon – and now it is a reality.

Late last year Facebook disposed of the paging feature within albums in favour of showing all the photos in an album in one page. Now you’ll not even have to leave your mini-feed to see new uploads.

Facebook is rolling out a lightbox feature to the mini-feed. Once a friend has uploaded an image it will still appear in the mini-feed as usual, but now when you click on it the larger version of the photo will pop up in a lightbox in the centre of the page.

This is a great feature and makes browsing a new album quicker and more enjoyable. The lightbox makes the rest of the page darker so the image is the main focus.

Although these tools are great and a welcome extension to an already feature-full application, I think a slideshow option would be useful. This would allow you to browse through an album without clicking anything.

Another new feature worth noting is the drag-and-drop reordering of albums and photos. This tool allows you to move around the order of your albums regardless of the date they were uploaded.

This feature is most noteworthy because it was created during one of Facebook’s all-night hackathons by Andrey Sukhachev, a software engineer at Facebook and former software architect at Ning.

These new tools along with the new uploader will definitely give the competition a run for their money. I will be interested to see how sites like Flickr respond and up the application.