Facebook is commonly recognized and joked about as being the owner of all pictures across the Internet. With more than a billion people uploading photos to the popular social network, it would seem Facebook has the trademark on everyone's individual photo albums. Now, thanks to a development at the company's hackathon, it will soon have everyone's friendships on file in picture form as well.
Facebook will be launching a new feature on the site that will allow friends and relatives to collaborate on photo albums. This will, for the first time, allow multiple users to add, edit and share photos on the same album.
Users will be allowed to give as many as 50 people access to an album as "contributors" who can each share up to 200 photos. According to Mashable, album creators can then choose a setting that allows contributors to invite others to the album, or retain complete control over the album's invites.
There are three possible privacy settings currently available for users on the album: public, friends of contributors and contributors only.
"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," said Bob Baldwin, the software engineer at Facebook who thought up this project with a colleague Fred Zhao.
According to Baldwin's information, only Album creators will have complete control over every picture. Contributors will only be able to edit and delete the photos that they upload.
As VentureBeat points out, this will render several apps that already provide this functionality completely useless as everything Facebook decides to take on is simply too big to fail. If users can do this directly through Facebook's site or mobile apps, there is no reason for users to tolerate a third party developer anymore. This will leave apps like: Cluster, Albumatic, Keepsy, Swirl, Flock, Kicksend, Kaptur and others obsolete.
