Facebook To Upgrade Photos Feature

It appears that yet another upgrade from social media giant Facebook is set to be launched.



According to Jolie O'Dell's article Facebook Upgrades Photos: Look Out, Flickr, Facebook will soon be upgrading its photos feature which will reportedly put them into competition with photo sharing site Flickr. High-res photos, photo-downloaded links, bulk tagging options, and a lightbox interface that allows images to be viewed anywhere on the site are all being added.


Up until now Facebook's photos feature has only been able to be used for capturing memories but this upgrade will completely change that. Facebook will be able to target photographers to post their portfolios along with modeling and graphic design portfolios.

Very soon users will be able to download high-res images of up to 2048 pixels or higher. Currently Facebook users can only download 720 pixels.

Another big change will be the lightbox UI. When you click on a photo a black screen will come up with the photo you desire and limited navigation features. This is being done to let users focus better on the picture(s) they want to see.

The new bulk tagging feature sounds handy as well. This feature will let users tag people in photos by grouping pictures of them together and then clicking on a single thumbnail to tag all the photos.

All of this upgrading will cost more money though which will inevitably mean more ads on Facebook. However if that keeps us the users from paying anything for it and getting a more advanced Facebook, I say bring on the ads.



Image courtesy of Flickr, Jay Cameron

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Technology and journalism converge at Newseum

The front pages of newspapers after Obama's victory
on an inside wall of the Newseum

Hewlett-Packard and the Newseum will become founding partners and are encouraging the rapidly changing technology and media worlds as they converge.

HP has generously offered $5 million to the Newseum in Washington, D.C. in an effort to create a journalism technology exhibit.

The exhibit will incorporate a live "Twitter-like"  news feed on touch-activated walls for which museum goers can interact.

This will allow a large array of museum goers to learn about the uses of media and how it affects them in order to spark the interests of all age groups and backgrounds.

Shelby Coffey, a Newseum trustee and former editor of the Los Angeles Times said the exhibit will be designed "so we'll be able to change things within it" as quickly as possibly and in time with the fast-paced changes in technology.

The more I pay attention to news about the media and journalism, the more I see it coinciding with advances in technology. There is an obvious correlation between the two and I found it to be clever that HP has  employed their own resources to better educate the population.

HP has realized the growing uses of technology in the media world and this large donation is evidence of just that. McKinney pointed out that "our customers use our technology to access that kind of information."

McKinney hopes the exhibit will represent coverage of breaking news in similar ways that live streams like Twitter have done. At the same time, it will educate viewers about being wary of the accuracy of some social-media sources. Not everything you read on the Internet is true.

This generation of journalists will likely benefit from the exhibit because the majority have grown up using technology to gain a competitive advantage.

More than anything, it's common sense that says journalists are going to be moving right along with advances in technology. It's encouraging to me and I'm sure many other journalists that museums such as the Newseum are staying as relevant as media says they should.

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