Facebook Gets Shared Photo Albums

Facebook is rolling out a new Shared Photo Album feature starting today, reports Mashable.

The world's largest social network announced shared photo albums on Monday, a new feature that allows multiple users to upload images to the same album. The album creator can share access to as many as 50 "contributors," who can each in turn share up to 200 photos. Previously, users could only upload photos to albums they created, and each album was limited to 1,000 total photos. The new shared albums have three available privacy settings: public, friends of contributors and contributors only.

The project was spearheaded by Bob Baldwin a software engineer at Facebook and his colleague Fred Zhao. A company-wide hackathon was held in January and about a dozen engineers worked through the night to create the feature.


"I think one thing that's really fun about creating products at Facebook is that you're never quite sure how people will use the product in the end," Baldwin said. "We're really excited for launch because we think people will use [shared albums] in ways that we're not even thinking of."

Album creators will have the power to delete or modify any photo in the album but contributors can only edit photos they've uploaded. Currently, there is a 200 photo limit per person; however, that may increase in the future. Also, the ability to create an album has yet to make it to mobile; however, you can contribute to an album from a mobile device. The feature is not available for Page albums.

Facebook is rolling out Shared Photo Albums to select English users today and will expand it to all English users before it finally reaches international users.

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