Facebook’s new photo design brings magazine layouts and full-screen pics

Facebook is preparing to change its photo layout once again, and the new experience is as slick as thumbing through a glossy print magazine, one where you yourself in control of the layout.

In that sense, it’s a perfect fit for the company’s Timeline aesthetic of highly visual tiles in varying sizes that correlate to the object’s actual importance in your life.

The new pics format will let you gaze at your and your friends’ images in glorious full-screen sizes, and for photos on your own page, you can choose to highlight the ones that are most meaningful to you just by clicking the star icon — the same one you’d click to highlight activity on your timeline.

With the new design, when you click on the Photos tile at the top of your own timeline, you’ll be directed to a new kind of page. Instead of white space separating a bunch of dinky thumbnails, you’ll see a mosaic of pictures that fills up the entire page. From there, you can use the menu to find images you’re tagged in, pictures you’ve posted, and albums you’ve created.

The company first started making major changes to its photo features a while ago, but we have a sneaking suspicion the latest upgrade is a direct result of a certain acquisition/hiring deal.

Facebook snapped up photo-sharing app Lightbox back in May. The similarities between the new Facebook photos layouts and the Lightbox app layouts reach right down to the varying image sizes displayed as Metro-esque mosaics.

Here’s a look at the new Facebook photo layout, with Lightbox screengrabs for comparison:

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Top image courtesy of lev dolgachov, Shutterstock