Group-sharing public albums on Facebook

Facebook has connected the world like never before, but there is still a long way to go.

Take a simple example.

You go out with friends for an event. If you’re like most groups, none of you have a thing for taking photos – at least not with anything except a phone camera. But if you’re like some other groups, then you have a few point-&-shoots and maybe even a couple of DSLRs that day.

Either way, the fact is that today more than one person in any group usually ends up taking the photos.

Then what, is everyone supposed to go back and upload their own pics and create their own albums for the same event? Or are people supposed to email all pics to one person who then uploads them all together?

The ideal way – the best way – the “connected” way, if you will – is to let everyone upload their photos and create their own albums – which can then be merged into one giant event album. If timestamps are synchronized, then the photos can automatically be sorted according to time of clicking, allowing the viewer to see the event from different perspectives as it unfolds.

Obviously, one thing will have to be kept in mind – the fact that different users have different privacy settings.

That can be tackled by one of two ways –

• Let the privacy setting for the viewer decide – if the individual albums are public, then anyone can see all the photos. If the album is viewable to friends of contributors, and you are friends with only one of the contributors, then you can only see photos submitted by that contributor. For all other photos that the viewer comes across, there will be a message stating that this photo is not viewable due to the privacy settings of the contributor(s).

• Just make them public – The simpler better way is to just make group-sharing albums like these as public by default. If one contributes photos to such an album, then everyone can see those photos. The only problem here is that there will be close-knit groups of friends who will want to use these album-sharing options without letting the whole world see what they’ve been up to.

This entire option of album-sharing and consolidation should exist even for existing albums. One user creates an album-sharing event with a description and sends the invite to his friends. Each of those friends can select which of their existing photos should be added in that shared-album, or they can even upload fresh photos.

Once the photos have been submitted by someone, the user who has created the album gets creative control over the content like order of arrangement, exclusion, selecting a cover image, and such like.

This can also be done for public events like concerts and F1 races where the owner creates the album-sharing event for Public and posts it on his wall. The way to popularize this feature this could be to ensure that once any user shares any photos with a shared-album, a status update is automatically shared on his/her feed. This will ensure that enough people find out about the common shared-album and usage of this feature will proliferate.

A problem that can be foreseen here is the limit of 200 photos per album that Facebook has.

Either that has to go, or Facebook should allow some of the features mentioned below to be part of the shared-album viewing experience –

• See the Most Liked photos (E.g. 14 out of 187)
  (in original time-stamped order, or decreasing order of Most Liked)

• See the Most Viewed photos (E.g. 19 out of 187)
  (in original time-stamped order, or decreasing order of Most Viewed)

Here, Most Viewed photos can be defined as
Photos
Where
nv(p) ——— Number of Views for Photo
> ————– is greater than
nv(all) ——– Number of Total Views for all Photos
/ ————— divided by
count(all) — Number of Total Unique Viewers