Collaborative photo albums are coming to Facebook soon. The social network began rolling out the new feature to a limited number of English users but plans to roll the feature out internationally in the future.
Shared photo albums will allow users to create a collaborative album with full privacy controls. You can choose between sharing publicly, friends of contributors, and contributors only, making sure you’re sharing to who you want.
Since the feature is still being experimented with, there are a few limitations. There’s a limit of 50 contributors and each can only share up to 200 photos. Facebook developers have stated that they plan to increase this limit if needed in the future. The shared photo album feature also only works with the web. There are plans to bring the feature to mobile devices in the future.
The idea for shared photo albums came from one of Facebook’s “hackathon” sessions where employees gather outside of work to create experimental features. “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,” says Bob Baldwin, the Facebook engineer who lead the shared albums project.
Facebook isn’t the only company to see the value behind collaborative photo albums. Google released an update to its Google+ social network during the company’s 2012 Google I/O developers conference. Google’s shared albums, dubbed “Party Mode”, allows guests to participate in sharing photos at an event, which get broadcasted live on Google+.
