Not every photo is worth exactly 1,000 words. That sweet pic of you skydiving is a lot more interesting than your lunch. So today Facebook profiles on iOS and Android apps are getting a new collage design for photos that enlarges your most-Liked pics, Facebook tells me. There’s also a new “Uploads” tab that shows all the photos you posted in one place so your friends don’t have to dig through pics scattered in different albums like before. And if they do want to explore your albums, they’ll see big cover photos for each rather than just a list of album names and tiny thumbnails.
While messaging apps like the ephemeral Snapchat may see more photos shared each day, Facebook is still the top place for looking through endless permanent photos of friends. And according to its test, Facebook says these new designs will have people browsing and liking more photos than ever.
The new features will be turned on over the next couple of hours for all iOS and Android users, and won’t require an app update. There’s no current plan to bring this to the web profile, but Facebook does dynamically show certain photos bigger when upload a few to the News Feed at the same time.
Back in 2012, Facebook tested a way to let you choose your favorite photos and enlarge them on your profile by clicking a star button. But it’s likely that few users noticed the feature or took the time to manually select their best pics.
Now Facebook is doing this automatically on mobile by looking at which of your photos have the most Likes. Photos it deems worthy show up 6X larger. There’s no way to un-highlight photos in the new college view, though, so you have to hope embarrassing shots of you don’t get too many Likes.
Photo sharing split in two these last few years. After nearly a decade of manicured, permanent photo sharing spearheaded by Facebook’s profile and Instagram, Snapchat found lots of people want to share casual, off-the-cuff photos that disappear.
Facebook’s two tries at ephemeral photo sharing, Poke and Slingshot, haven’t gained traction. But as long as it keeps improving with updates like today’s, there will still be plenty of people who want to browse through years worth of each other’s saved photos. How else would you know if you should have a crush on them?