Facebook revamped the look and presentation of their photo albums tonight, going to a dark-background shadowbox effect. The photos also seem to gain a bit in size. The change is striking and sends a couple of significant messages about the direction of social photography online. It’s another shot across the bow of Flickr. As cameras improve, people view photography as something accessible and easy. The shadowbox effect – almost exclusively an artistic rather than social move – is an attempt to capitalize on the democratization of high-quality tools for photography. This is Flickr’s core cache as a sharing site where amateur photographers have built a community around aesthetic concerns.
In late September, Facebook began offering high resolution photo uploads with a warning that it could take ages to send off a batch of images, a warning to the party pic crowd with an editing aversion. The new look departs distinctly from Flickr’s blanched background and sides with several prominent photography sites. If 600 million Facebook users grow accustomed to seeing their photos in the dark, then is black the new white?
