Announcements Discussion

Facebook Makes Changes To Improve Photo Viewer

The developers at Facebook are always up to something, but not everyone appreciates all of the changes. However, this new tweak looks like a definite improvement on the layout of the Facebook photo viewer.

It’s pretty simplistic, and dare I say it a leans towards the Google+ model, but the latest change now sees the additional content associated with a photo all displayed on the right hand side of the screen, rather than beneath the image. Here’s an example using a picture of me about to get flattened:

new facebook photo layout
Take it from me, I was a very sore man the next day!

As you can see, there’s nothing new in terms of content, but the layout has changed. The reason I’m such a fan of this is that oftentimes a picture starts a string of comments between friends, and you can find yourself scrolling up and down for ages. When someone references anything about the photo – eg. look at the expression on George’s face! – you have to go all the way back up to see when they were talking about, and then scroll back down to continue reading all the comments.

Admittedly this is not exactly an innovation – as I said, this is how Google+ operates – but it’s good to see that Facebook are trying to iron out some of the wrinkles that irritate people with existing features before they roll out completely new concepts and functionality.