Facebook Introduces ‘Shared Albums’, Allows Up to 50 Users to Collaborate on a Single Album

Given the fact that it’s dead simple to upload and share images on Facebook, it’s a little surprising that all this time, there’s never been a collaboration feature for albums. That changes this week, though, as Facebook  has begun rolling out a new feature called “Shared Albums” – and like most new features, it might take a little while to reach you.

The feature is simple in design: One user creates the album to kick things off, and can then invite up to 50 people to act as contributors; each person can upload up to 200 photos, and they can only edit or delete their own (though it can be assumed that the album creator would gain global delete abilities).

To keep things a little private, shared albums can be configured to be accessible only to contributors. If that’s not the intention, then they can instead be exposed to friends of contributors, or open to the public.

The uses for shared albums are obvious: weddings, parties, and other events. On the geekier side, picture a group of friends that all go to the same LAN party or gaming show. With shared albums, they’d be able to group the photos altogether so that those who care to look at them will be able to see a lot more than what just one person uploaded. For those that don’t want that, we’d hope that a filtering feature would exist so that you can see only your friend’s photos.

One thing seems certain: This is a Facebook feature that’s likely to explode in popularity, right away.