Facebook Announces New Feature: Shared Photo Albums; Up To 50 Contributors Can Upload 10,000 Pictures To Same Album Starting Monday

Facebook announced on Monday that a new feature will be rolled out starting this week: shared photo albums. Multiple users can upload pictures to the same album, which would boost group engagement on Facebook.

According to Mashable.com, a Facebook album creator can share access to as many as 50 "contributors," who can each in turn share up to 200 photos on that album.

In total, this means shared albums can be as large as 10,000 photos, TechCrunch.com reports. Previously, albums were limited to 1,000 total photos and users could only add pictures to their own albums, the website notes.

The new shared albums have three available privacy settings: public, friends of contributors, and contributors only, Mashable.com reports. This gives the album's original creator control over who has access to the group's images, said Bob Baldwin, the software engineer at Facebook who spearheaded the project with colleague Fred Zhao.

"Right now, if you were at a party and there were three different albums created, you might not be able to see all the photos [based on privacy settings], which is kind of confusing and frustrating," Baldwin said.

Album creators will have the power to delete or modify photos in the album, but contributors will have editing power over photos that they upload, Mashable.com notes.

"I think one thing that's really fun about creating products at Facebook is that you're never quite sure how people will use the product in the end," Baldwin added.

"We're really excited for launch because we think people will use [shared albums] in ways that we're not even thinking of."

Facebook will begin to roll out this new feature to a small group of English users on Monday and then integrate it for all English users before expanding internationally, according to Baldwin, Mashable.com reports.