I’ve heard that you can now create shared photo albums on Facebook. That’s terrific, as there are plenty of times my friends and I are at the same event and would like to pool our photos. But how do I create these shared photo galleries or photo albums on Facebook?
Innovation comes from all over, and I think the first place I saw shared photo albums or galleries was on Pinterest, of all places. In fact, I’m a co-contributor to a number of shared “boards” on Pinterest and while generally there are one or two people who seem to contribute the lion’s share of imagery, they are a good mix of different images from different people. Shared albums are also ideal for schools and school activities: Assign three or four photographers, have them pool all their photographs of a concert, sporting event, holiday activity, etc, then let every parent in the school view the results. Simple, easy, darn useful.
And now, apparently as a result of a “hackathon” project inside Facebook over a weekend, you can do just that on Facebook too, adding as many people to a photo album as you’d like, with all of them having the rights to upload and post or add photos to the album. Super cool.
To demonstrate how to create a shared photo album, I’ll use a few images I had on the desktop from a previous post here on AskDaveTaylor, actually.
To start, I’ll upload a group of photos and create a Photo Album:
Give the Album a name, upload the images, add captions as appropriate, the usual drill:
Once you’ve clicked “Post Photos” and they’ve all been uploaded (and I always recommend you checking “High Quality” on the lower left, by the way) you’ll be shown the new photo album and will see that there’s a new button in town, one that’s quite apropos what we’re discussing:
Click on the “Make Shared Album” button (which you can utilize on older albums too. In fact, it appears you can make any photo album shared even if it’s been sitting in your account for years) and…
I don’t really understand why the album privacy setting has moved here and surmise that’ll change back to somewhere a bit more logical, but the important part is, of course, the contributors box. Just start typing a name and the standard Facebook autocomplete appears. I’ll add my friend Tracy and you’ll see, another option appears too:
By leaving the “Contributors can add their friends as contributors” option checked, we’re kind of opening things up for a certain level of potential chaos. Friends of friends of friends, and soon you have the possibility of thousands of people contributing to an album. So think carefully about whether that’s what you want.
If so, just leave it checked and click “Save” after you’ve specified all your friends who should have contributor status.
Saved? Now Facebook will confirm the status of the photo album by showing how many contributors there are:
Very slick addition to the service and one that I expect will get quite a lot of use once people learn how to utilize it properly!
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