The Facebook Blog

Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site with over 2.5 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month. In order to make sharing photos even easier, today we are announcing a new and improved photo uploader.

Recently we've received feedback that people struggle with our current photo uploader due to various technical issues, while others are confused by the installation process. In this new version of the photo uploader, we have solved many of those problems and developed a fast, stable and simple experience for sharing photos on Facebook.

The... new uploader will be rolling out gradually over the next several weeks. Once this upgrade has launched for you, the first time you go to upload a new photo you'll be asked to install the Facebook Plug-In. Simply click "Install" when you see the dialogue box in your web browser. Installation should take no longer than two minutes, and you will usually not have to restart your browser to continue.



Once the installation is complete, you will see a simple photo browser appear in a dialogue box on your screen. The top half of the box allows you to browse and select the folders from your desktop that contain your photos. From the bottom half of the box, you can choose which photos you'd like to upload to your Facebook profile. Click the "Use Selected Photos" button when you're ready to upload.



Once you have started your upload, you'll discover another feature, asynchronous uploading, that allows you to navigate away from the upload page, or even away from Facebook completely, while your photos continue to upload in the background. When the process is complete, you will receive a notification and can navigate back to edit, tag and add captions to your photos.

The installation box for the photo uploader will appear anytime you do something on the site that requires it—for example, when you create a new photo album or add photos to an existing album. The new photo uploader will also support additional image formats.

Our goal with this upgrade is to give you a fast, stable and simple experience for sharing photos on Facebook with your friends. If you have additional questions about the new photo uploader, please visit the Help Center or read this post on the Facebook Engineering Page to learn more about the technical details.


Chris, a Facebook engineer, is uploading photos from last night's Hackathon.

Every month, more than 850 million photos are uploaded on Facebook—making it the largest photo-sharing site. With photos being so popular, we're constantly working to improve your experience in sharing them.

We noticed that many of you wanted to create larger photo albums to display all the images from a trip or event in one place. So we've now expanded the number of photos an album can hold from 60 to 200.

We tested this limit increase for a couple months, finding that it resulted in significantly more photos being shared as well as a better... experience. With our new Haystack storage system, we were also prepared to store and serve more photos than before.

Over time, we hope to give you even more options to share photos efficiently.


Chris, an engineer, is about to create a huge photo album from his recent trip to New York City.

Since we launched video last year, more than 45 million videos have been uploaded to Facebook with approximately 100,000 new videos added each day. Starting today, you'll be able to upload higher quality videos to Facebook and also embed your Facebook videos on other websites.

Higher quality video means we'll be supporting higher resolutions—as much as 1280 by 720 pixels (720p)—which means crisper quality than was previously possible on Facebook. Plus, we've upgraded our audio, too.

Even if you don't own a HD camera or you don't actively upload videos to Facebook, you'll still be able to enjoy higher quality videos all over the site. This means movie studios, bands and anyone else that uploads videos to Facebook will be able to provide you with a better viewing experience.
You'll also be able to take videos you've added to Facebook and embed them on other websites. If you have a blog, personal or business website, you'll be able to display any of your Facebook videos on that site as well. We're making it easy for you to share your videos across the web with the same privacy settings you have on Facebook, which means that if the privacy is set to "Everyone", people won't have to be logged into Facebook to view it. Or if you want only a few friends to view your video, you can control that through your Facebook privacy settings as well.

New and improved video on Facebook, now in high definition (view in full-screen mode by selecting the icon on the lower right):



Chris, an engineer working on Facebook video, can't wait to see his friends in high definition.

Sometime in early January my roommate (also a Facebook engineer) and I were talking late at night in the office and shared a realization: we both had tons of videos we had taken with our phones and digital cameras, and had nowhere to put them. Of course, plenty of video sharing sites already existed, but none provided useful distribution to our friends (like Facebook's Photos application). Now that consumer mobile phones and digital cameras are perfectly capable of taking good quality video, we knew that it was time to build a video application... on top of the social graph.

With the January Hackathon just around the corner, we had the perfect opportunity to work on Video and show our fellow engineers just how useful we believed it would be. A few months of iteration later, we're very proud to present this to you.

Video is something that's been around on a lot of other sites, but few have truly useful ways to share your videos with your friends. We think we've fixed this problem. We also saw plenty of other issues with the other products out there and tried our best to do better. Here are some of the highlights.

1. Videos of your friends are interesting. You can tag your friends in videos just like you would with Photos. Since video on Facebook involves people you actually know, it's much more interesting content and much more relevant.


2. Higher quality videos. Our video player has much better quality and privacy controls than most other video sharing sites. We also support many more source formats and we don't letterbox any of our content.


3. Video messaging. Video messaging is cool because it is asynchronous, meaning you can send what is essentially "video voicemail" back and forth with a friend or even many friends at once. Plus, it's all integrated into the Inbox.


4. Mobile integration. We support most mobile providers, so all you have to do is take a video on your phone and email it to video@facebook.com.

Since Facebook Platform was under development at the same time as Video, the Platform team used Video for cues as to what hooks and features we needed to provide to 3rd party developers. Anyone could have built Video for Facebook, which is why you have to add Video to your account, just like you would add any other application. Enjoy!



Chris Putnam, a Facebook engineer, is heading to Vegas for his 21st birthday and is now unsure if building Video was a good idea.