News tagged with "facebook"

With the announcement of Facebook Home, a launcher or 'skin' that can be installed on top of the Android operating system of your mobile phone, the social networking giant has instantly transformed the role and importance of images in social media, bringing them to the forefront in a way that not even its desktop Timeline feature could. We are having a closer look at what Facebook Home is and what it means for image sharing.

While the privacy and permissions surrounding Facebook-shared photographs have always seemed like a bit of a gray area, a new service is pushing the envelope further. Photos At My Door lets users log in with their Facebook account and access photos of friends. You can then order prints of those photos or even print them on coffee mugs, mouse pads and iPhone cases. Read more about the service and our take on it at connect.dpreview.com.

Facebook has announced an upcoming update to the way photos are presented in user News Feeds. More space will be devoted to images, displaying them more prominently on the page. This is the second redesign that focuses on bigger pictures since July last year. The result of the redesign is not too dissimilar to Google+. In addition, the News Feed can be filtered to view only photo-based updates. The company says it is rolling the changes out in the coming weeks to both desktop and mobile version.

Facebook has updated the way photos are presented in the timeline section of users' profiles - devoting more page space to the images and making it easier to give some images prominence. The result is an awful lot like the Google+ gallery view, and the Flickr interface for viewing contacts' images but appears to crop all images to square format. The Facebook update gives the ability to 'highlight' specific images (making them four times larger) but doesn't just present your own images - images with you tagged in them will be intermingled with your own shots, so it's not an optimal way to showcase your photography, unless you ruthlessly de-tag yourself from other peoples' photos.

Facebook has announced a free app called Camera that focuses on viewing and sharing photos. Instead of showing what your friends are doing and thinking, it just dives straight to their photo galleries. The app also allows you to share multiple photos at a time, including descriptions and tagging. There are also tools for cropping and applying filters to your images. The app allows Facebook to be used in a much more Instagram-like manner (and it seems too soon for this to be a product of the Facebook buyout). Updated with first impressions.

Just as Instagram looked to expand its ambitions as a mobile photo sharing network, it has been bought by Facebook for $1bn. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says his company 'need[s] to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram's strengths and features, rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.' He stresses the importance of growing the service independently of Facebook and voices support for Instagram's recent expansion to easily share images from other Apps, such as Hipstamatic and Camera Awesome.

Facebook has added high resolution photos and full screen photo viewing. From today, the photo viewer will show the highest resolution image available, rather than offering a download link for higher-res images (up to 2048 pixels along each edge). An option to expand the photo to fullscreen has also been added. The changes also include adding a simplified version of the sRGB color profile to each image, increasing its chances of displaying color correctly.

Facebook is making its first steps towards taking photography seriously with the launch of its Lightbox display interface. The change, which is being rolled-out to users in the coming weeks, darkens the rest of the screen when a photo is selected and shows images in greater detail than before (up to 960 pixels in each dimension). How does this presentation compare to the more obviously photo-friendly Google+ service?