Facebook is revamping its photo album functionality, letting members store images with a much higher resolution, simplifying the tagging process and improving the performance of the upload tool.
Facebook is increasing the maximum size of photos from 720 pixels to 2,048 pixels, a setting that yields "print quality, high resolution" images, the company said on Thursday.
Facebook also said it has made it simpler to assign the same tags to multiple photos of the same event or person. The photo viewer got a makeover: it pops up in the middle of the screen, as opposed to in a separate page, and flipping through the images is faster.
The photo uploader has been rebuilt with "the latest Flash technology" so it's faster, easier and less error prone to transfer images to one's account, especially large amounts at once.
Facebook will roll out the improvements to all members in the coming month.
The announcement comes less than two months after Facebook improved photo browsing by increasing the number of album thumbnail images displayed on a single page from 20 to 200. Facebook also made thumbnails bigger.
Facebook members have uploaded tens of billions of images to the social network. In July, Facebook ranked as the largest photo sharing site in the U.S. with 98.5 million unique visitors to its photo sections, way ahead of Photobucket, which ranked second with 27.4 million, according to comScore.
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