Facebook engineers redesigned its Photo Viewer to revamp the Photos experience and the new version will be released over the next few weeks. The new photo viewer will display images as a light-box like pop-up, which is a major change over the static nature of the existing photo viewer. The new design also aims to make comment viewing and sharing simpler.
With the new viewer, the UI offers keyboard shortcuts to skip and move around the gallery or do the same by the regular means of mouse based navigation with the help of thumbnails. The keyboard shortcuts include right or left arrow keys to scroll through the album and the escape key to close the viewer. The Facebook developer diary claims that the new viewer fixes all the problems plaguing the existing viewer, like the inability of images to load without a page refresh, which should certainly make life easier.
The final version of the Photo Viewer.
The final product is a lightweight, ultra-fast photo viewing experience that has increased both viewing and interactions. In addition, users see less errors and less loading indicators.
According to Facebook, the photo viewer component was “supported by some of the oldest code in the system and was in dire need of an upgrade”, and it believes that the revamped photo viewer will boost photo views by 5 percent, which should translate to a difference that numbers in the billions considering the scope of the social networking platform.