Facebook is the world’s largest photo-sharing site, and it’s not even close. Every single day, users upload 250 million photos. Seriously, pause and think about that number for bit. Now imagine how many photos are uploaded in a week…a month…a year? It is estimated that Facebook actually houses somewhere around 4% of all photos ever taken in the history of the world.
With billions upon billions of photos, it’s no surprise that Facebook is focusing on that aspect of its users’ experience. It has been argued that the photo-sharing sphere is the ultimate future of the social network, and growth and user engagement is directly tied to maintaing dominance as the world’s premier place to look at pictures. A recent billion dollar acquisition should tell you that.
With all of that in mind, Facebook is beginning to upgrade the desktop News Feed to make photo-browsing more interesting. Last week, we told you that Facebook was starting to roll out new photo layouts to its users. The new layouts mimicked the ones that users have seen on Facebook’s iOS and Android apps – bigger photos and more photos displayed in posts.
For instance, here’s the large photo flanked by three smaller photo look that has appeared on mobile for a few weeks as it currently appears on the web version:
And that’s not the only one. Some users have begun to see a bunch of new layouts including a four-panel one and a nine-panel one.
Here’s what the four-panel layout looks like:
And here’s the nine-panel layout:
I’ve also spotted a new six-panel layout:
We mentioned that the News Feed photo layout redesign would also finally give pages the chance to display larger photos in posts. It appears that has begun to roll out as well:
