Photographs are among the most engaging content you’ll find on social networks like Facebook, Google+ or Instagram. For Facebook, photos hold a special place amongst all types of content posted by users, taking center stage on the new Timeline where Facebook has placed great emphasis on the visual.

Facebook has long been a competitor in the photo-sharing space. The social network is indeed rolling out improvements for album management, including increasing the maximum resolution for pictures, which went from 720 to 2048 pixel resolution this week. The network has made some updates to its photo viewer as well, which will now display photos at a high resolution by default.

The social networking giant also made changes to allow full screen gallery mode by clicking arrows in the top right corner of a photo. The photo will now display four times larger than before on a big screen display with a maximum resolution of 2048 x 2048.

The full-screen functionality is already active.

The big change is really visible in Google Chrome and Firefox. In the upper right corner of the photographs is an arrow to which you have to make click on it. The latest version of the interface was released in February.

Ryan Mack, a Facebook engineer said that the social network knew of the defects in the quality of images, such as a deterioration of color and charge time to the site. All these new services should be available in the coming days for all members of the site.

Evolution of Facebook Photos

Facebook currently has over 200 million photos uploaded per day, or around 6 billion per month. There are close to 90 billion photos total on Facebook. This means Facebook is the largest photos site on the Internet by far.

Facebook had increased the limit of the original pixels (604) to 720 in March 2010. Later Facebook acquired Divvyshot in second quarter of 2010, a social network that has provided the ability to download high resolution photo albums (HD), with a maximum resolution of 2048 x 2048 pixels and equipped the new Flash uploader of files.

In addition to increasing the maximum size of photos, Facebook had brought some changes in the user interface (UI). Now, the picture viewer allows users to view photos without going to other pages. User can scroll through photos or albums to come back to the previous page, without leaving the viewer. The new principle of viewing pictures not only provided a quick and easy navigation, but also a better perception of the image.

Facebook also updated the Flash loader software download last year for improved stability and performance. They had made improvements in viewfinder simplify the experience to navigate between photos and albums. Now instead of going to a new page, the pictures will be displayed in a box in the center of the image.

One more update late last year was a rewrite of a large part of the viewer code and upload mechanism. Now you can tag groups of photos and pictures of the same person. Users often upload photos from a set of events such as weddings and birthdays, which depict the same people. You can now tag a few photos in one album at once, and tag photos of the same person with much less effort.