Facebook, the most addictive social networking site creates addiction and attraction from its regular updates and addition of new features which makes it more than just a social networking site.
Features like Facebook Page Redesign, Facebook Profile Redesign were widely accepted and appreciated by the members of this social network, while on the other hand one of the features called Facebook Photo Viewer came under a lot of heat and criticism.
Simply stating this new photo viewer allows browsing and viewing of pictures in a separate lightbox effect. The picture to be browsed appears in a theatre view while the rest of the page background goes dark.
The idea of this Viewer was good but its implementation wasn’t. No doubt viewing a picture in a slideshow type format looks great but if it lacks the necessary smoothness and causes a hindrance in the working of the page, this idea is all trash. That was what happened to this new feature.
If you too are not a big fan of this New Photo Viewer, beneath are a few ways to get rid of this annoying feature.
Manual way
You can manually remove this lightbox slideshow and probably if you are regular on Facebook you might know these two simple ways:
1. Refreshing the image page simply would cause this lightbox to vanish and present you the picture in the same required old fashioned way.
2. This can also be done by simply removing the “&theatre” word from the end of the URL of the image page and this closes the lightbox and the theatre view.
Both these ways are simple enough but are to be repeated on every image page and only provide a temporary solution and therefore annoying. There are other ways which are better and permanent at the same time.
Extensions to turn off the New Photo Viewer
Following are a few permanent and less annoying solutions to avoid this New featureand are available for almost all the major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari etc:
Facebook Lightbox Killer
This is a simple extension which is available for Chrome and Firefox browsers which can be simply downloaded and used to kill this lightbox.
Revert Facebook Photo Viewer
this extension is only available for Chrome users currently. It runs in the background silently and there are no visible icons.
You just need to download and install it. According to the developer of this extension it is very safe and secure and no Facebook data would be recorded or copied in any sense.
Better Facebook
This is available for almost all the leading browsers like Chrome, Safari, Operaand Firefox and is absolutely free.
It provides you with more than 75 options to make your social networking experience better and helps you manage a lot of features on Facebook according to your own will.
One of these options is an option to remove the New Facebook Photo Viewer.
Am I missing where the links are to these tools?
I feel it is so important in today’s society, that we protect the little privacy that we have and have a sense of control. Thank you for the google alerts and turn off facebook photos.
Very nice list of tools….
And another manual way, you can also open the photo in a new tab/window to view it in the old photo viewer.