Since the dawn of Facebook’s Photos feature, users have been tasked with the not-so-terrible burden of having to manually click through every photo in an album. Sure, you can also hit the arrow key on your keyboard to jump to the next picture, but even that repetitive task could send you inching down the treacherous path toward carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, there’s a way to view hundreds of photos without lifting a finger: a new Facebook Prototype lets you turn these photo albums into slideshows. You can activate the prototype here.

The new feature was released as a Facebook Prototype some time last week, and it’s about as basic as they come. After activating it, you’ll find a ‘Play’ button nestled between the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ navigation buttons in the photo viewer. Clicking it will turn the album you’re currently viewing into a slideshow, displaying a new photo every five seconds. That’s it. There apparently isn’t any way to change the frequency of the photo changes, and there aren’t any fancy transitions like you’ll get from iPhoto. But hey, you don’t have to click any more.

Facebook Prototypes are similar to Google Labs, in that they allow the social network to showcase some of the pet projects and unfinished features created by its engineers. Prototypes launched in September at TechCrunch50, and have since spawned some compelling new features, including a Mac desktop notifier, an improved photo uploader, and even a measure of Gross National Happiness.

Crunchbase

• FACEBOOK

Company: Facebook

Website: facebook.com

Launch Date: February 1, 2004

IPO: NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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