Tamlyn

Facebook’s photo albums have the potential to be really, really good. As it is they’re just about passable. I’d like to present my vision for a proper, integrated photo sharing experience. If anyone from Facebook is listening, give me a call - I want to help you!

First let’s look at what Facebook does well.

• The face tagging feature is pretty cool. I haven’t seen that on any other site and it works rather well.
• The batch uploader works pretty well too although I wish it wasn’t written in Java.

That’s about it for good things. Now the bad things.

• There’s no way to pool different people’s images from the same event. Yes, event pages have photo streams but they don’t really work.
• There’s no way to bookmark other people’s photos that you like.
• Facebook appears to strip all the EXIF data out of images. Why? I reckon over 99% of images uploaded are from digital cameras and therefore have date & time info in them that would be really useful.
• No overall structure to the albums. Want to find that funny pic of your mate at that party last year? Good luck!

Ok, so how could it be improved?

Make each photo album be an event. When you upload a batch of photos, Facebook can check the date & time they were taken against the events you attended to see if any match up. If not then you can search for other events from that time or simply create a new event retrospectively from within the photo upload process. (See super hi-tech flowchart)

Organising photos in this way means that all your friends’ photos from a single event will be presented chronologically in the same album. If you really care who took a photo you can filter by photographer.

But for the retrospective event creation to work, we need to fix the way Facebook does events too. Firstly, strip out the completely pointless fields like “Tagline”, “Network” & “Event Type” and make all other fields optional. (While we’re at it, let’s make the time & date optional too and allow group scheduling.) Add an option for ‘public’ or ‘private’ events - i.e. events put on by someone else (club night, festival etc.) or events that you’re putting on yourself (house party, camping trip etc.). Public events default to public visibility and anyone can invite themselves. Private events default to friends only.

So now everyone’s photos from that party last year are stored in a single album (and you can find it easily if you remember roughly when the party was or who was there) which you can browse by ‘All photos’, ‘Photos by my friends’ or ‘Photos of my friends’. Next to every photo is an ‘Add to favourites’ button which lets you easily find those really priceless photos when you need them most.

So, come on then Facebook. How about it?

Note 1: Privacy - just because you put all your photos in a single album doesn’t mean you have to make them visible to everyone. You could still say that you only want your photos to be visible to your friends and they would simply not appear to other people when viewing that album.

Note 2: it would probably be necessary to maintain the ability to create albums that don’t tie in to a particular event. Sometime you just want a collection of random images.