Facebook is preparing to roll out a new shared album feature that will allow multiple users to contribute to a single album, as first noted by Mashable.
When contacted by The Next Web, Facebook confirmed the arrival of the feature and provided the following statement:
Hundreds of millions of photos are uploaded onto Facebook each day and today, we’re making it even easier for friends to share photos with the rollout of Shared Photo Albums. Whether you’re at a wedding, birthday party, or fresh off of a trip, all your friends will be able to add photos, tag photos and edit just one album.
Album creators will be able to invite up to 50 contributors and each participant can upload up to 200 photos. Privacy options for shared albums will include: public, friends of contributors and just contributors.
Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin told the publication that select users will get access to the feature today. English-wide and international releases will come later.
In many social circles, Facebook has become the de facto place for uploading pictures from events and outings. In fact, it’s surprising that it took this long for shared albums to arrive.
Even with the help of Instagram, Facebook’s current lead in the social photo space is not a given. Google has been putting pressure on its rival by implementing new Google+ photo features that leverage its wide reach through other products like Gmail and Android. The Google+ app on Android, for instance, includes the ability to automatically backup photos to Google+. In May, Google upped its full-resolution photo storage limit on Google+ to 15GB and added new Auto Enhance and Auto Highlight tools. Meanwhile, Yahoo is also aiming to make Flickr awesome again through a new redesign and 1TB of free storage.
Photos have been a key interest for Facebook in recent weeks. The company recently partnered with Shutterstock to help advertisers include visuals in their ads. It also introduced new photo uploading support to its Pages Manager app for iOS and Android last week.
Image credit: Gonzalo Aragon
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