It’s no secret that Facebook Photos is massively popular, with the company boasting that it receives a whopping 2.5 billion photos uploaded every month. And as the site continues to grow — it just passed 400 million users — that number is only going to get more staggering. Unfortunately, the photo uploading experience hasn’t always been smooth; you’ve to wait for the photo uploads to finish, and the entire process was just sort of clunky. Today, the company announced that it’s rolling out an improved photo upload browser plugin.
The new plugin includes a new photo navigator that should make it easy to choose the photos you want. And once you’ve started the upload process, you can browse to another page — the plugin will keep uploading the files in the background.
This plugin has actually been available for the last few months in Facebook’s Prototypes section, and has even been rolled out to a very small number of users before now. Starting today it’s getting released to everyone, though the rollout will take a few weeks. Before now Facebook has offered an upload plugin based on Active X and a Java applet, but the company says this one was built entirely in-house. One important thing to note: because this was built by Facebook, the company could potentially add more functionality in the future, including things that aren’t related to photo uploads.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to upload photos to Facebook. The functionality has been integrated into iPhoto, you can download a Picasa Uploader, and there are plenty of unofficial apps available too.
