- The Way It Used to Be: Photo Viewing, Not Really Sharing
- Photo Sharing on Facebook: The New Way
- Uploading Photos to Share
- Viewing and Downloading High Resolution Photos
Viewing and Downloading High Resolution Photos
The new photo viewer is a subtle improvement over the old photo viewer. With the old viewer, when you clicked a photo in a friend’s photo album, a new page opened for viewing that photo. That’s not the case with the new photo viewer; click a thumbnail in a photo album and the photo viewer pops up on top of the page. To close the viewer and get back to the photo album, just click the X (close) button at the top right of the viewer.
Figure 2 Viewing photos with Facebook’s new photo viewer.
With the viewer open, you can move to the next photo in the album by clicking the right arrow; there’s no need to close the photo and then reopen the next one. Keep clicking the right arrow to move through all the photos in the album; click the left arrow to go back through the previously-viewed photos.
And here’s the good part. To download a print-quality version of this photo, click the Download High Res link underneath the photo. This saves the photo, in full resolution, to your hard drive. You can then print the photo yourself, or send it to a photo printing service to make prints.
By the way, the high resolution download option is present even if you’re not using the new photo viewer. In the older photo viewer, print-quality photos have a Download in High Resolution link; click this link to download the print-quality photo.
Of course, the high resolution download option is only available for those photos uploaded in high resolution. If there’s no Download High Res link present, your friend uploaded this photo in high resolution. You might want to nudge this friend to start uploading in high resolutionso you can safely print the photos you want.
(That said, you can still download low resolution photoseven though there’s no download link. Just right-click the photo and select Save Picture As from the pop-up menu. It’s old school and low res, but it works.)
By being able to upload and download high resolution photos, Facebook is finally a usable site for sharing family photos. Upload those photos (in high resolution) you want to share with family and friends; they can then view them online or download and print the ones they want to save. It’s the best of both worldsall on the Facebook site!