Facebook photos go high resolution and full screen

Facebook is continuing its quest to appeal to photographers with a couple of new improvements to its photo-viewing features. You can now enjoy your photos in glorious full-screen mode, and Facebook automatically shows the high-resolution version of your image.

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To view a photo in full-screen mode, click on the small arrows in the top right corner of the image. The full-screen feature hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet, and it will only work on the latest versions of the Firefox or Chrome browsers.

There’s another subtle change to how photos display. Over on the Facebook Engineering blog, Ryan Mac goes into deliciously geeky detail about his effort to fix colors on previews of Facebook photos. Most photos use sRGB color profiles, but browsers still require each image to define its color profile. Adding that information for every thumbnail and timeline image would be space hog, so Mac went on a quest to find a better way to handle the color profiles.

In early February, Facebook introduced its slick lightbox photo viewer, which was a drastic improvement over how images were displayed before. Those improvements may have been inspired by the Google+ photo features, but it’s unlikely Facebook is feeling much heat from that social network at the moment.