Facebook Unveils Shared Photo Albums

A picture's worth a thousand words, and now Facebook is letting others add to your conversation.

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. Album creators can choose a setting that allows contributors to invite others to the album, or retain total control over album invitations.

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. This gives the album creator control over who has access to the group's images, said Bob Baldwin, the software engineer at Facebook who spearheaded the project with colleague Fred Zhao.

"Right now, if you were at a party and there were three different albums created, you might not be able to see all the photos [based on privacy settings], which is kind of confusing and frustrating," Baldwin said. Album creators will have the power to delete or modify photos in the album, but contributors will have editing power over photos that they upload. The feature is not available for Page albums, says a Facebook spokesperson.

The new feature was built during one of Facebook's company-wide hackathon sessions, a time where employees set regular work aside and dream up new prototypes for the platform. At Facebook, hackathons are a exciting time to be on campus, said Zhao, and many employees spend the week leading up to a hackathon brainstorming ideas for prototypes with colleagues. Baldwin said the idea for shared photo albums was based on user feedback and circled among Facebook employees.

After deciding to tackle the project, Baldwin and Zhao sent out an internal invite before the hackathon in January. They recruited about a dozen engineers from across the company to contribute to the project; many of them worked on the prototype until 6 a.m. the following morning.

Shared albums will clearly be useful for group events like camping trips, weddings, parties and family reunions.

"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 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."

Zhao and Baldwin said they plan to develop some aspects of the feature even further. For starters, the 200 photo limit per person may increase in the future. They also hope to add mobile functionality for creating shared albums (right now, you can only contribute to one on mobile).

Facebook will begin to roll out this new feature to a small group of English users on Monday and then integrate it for all English users before expanding internationally, according to Baldwin.

How would you use a shared photo album on Facebook? Share with us in the comments below.