12 Comments »Trying to upload more than 60 photos from that recent trip you went on? Up until recently it wasn’t possible. While some users were reporting back in January that the limit had been raised up to 175 photos, Facebook had no official announcement then. Earlier today Chris Putnam posted on the Facebook blog that the company was now able to officially raise the album limit up to 200 photos thanks to the new Haystack storage system.
Rather than simply purchasing more servers (which the company has been doing also), the Facebook development team has been more heavily focused on making the existing systems more efficient. Whether that’s using memory more effectively or simply reading from filesystems, Facebook is heavily focused on system optimization. The company is know for their heavy use of Memcached, a “distributed memory object caching system”.
For those non-programmer out there, it’s essentially a system which helps developers avoid their dependancy on MySQL and other database systems. One of the best rules when working with a database is to not rely on the database. That’s where Memcached comes in. As Gary Orenstein wrote on GiagOm earlier this week, Memcached presents a sort of philosophical aspect to the Memcached/MySQL relationship.
Anyways, I’ve gone off on a tangent. The main point is that Facebook has developed an impressive storage system for photos and is now able to provide much more capacity for users. Given that Facebook’s the largest photo storage site on the web, I can assume that many users will be taking advantage of the increased limits. As Chris says in today’s blog post, they hope to begin providing more features over the coming months and years.
This upgrade is also extremely important for keeping people on Facebook. The more photos they store there, the more likely users are to keep coming back. While I haven’t seen any reports published that correlate photo upload usage and level of site activity, I’m willing to bet that the two factors have a strong correlation. Let us know if you’re already seeing the upgrade and have taken advantage of it!
I have photos that are split across two albums because I hit the original limit of 60.
Is it (or will it be) possible to move the photos from the “set two” album into the “set one” album, keeping all the tags and comments on those photos?
I have noticed the upgrade and I am happy about it! Facebook should’ve done this MONTHS ago because it would’ve made my life easier…in a way. I have loads of albums which are split and now it’s taking some time to condense some of them. I’m doing it manually. I wish there were an easier way??? (Oh yes, I will be taking advantage of the new limit increase.)
This one was long overdue… Still I am not satisfied with 200.. Why should there be limits at all??
Why oh why do they do this now instead of while me and my camera were at university?!
Seriously, great news for Facebook. It sounds trite, but that 60-shot limit was a real ballache.
Simply Ridiculous, it takes time for the developers to make a system where it can handle the amount of photos everyone has. Stop being so selfish and be happy with this upgrade. They could of just left it at 60 and not cared.
Just today, my aunt complained about how long it took for my facebook page to load…I’ve been scanning my negatives and uploading them, so I have quite a few stored…and it does load pretty slowly even on a high-speed connection. Is Haystack working quietly behind the scenes or do users need to do something to facilitate the efficiency?
Hello. The expand to 200 photos aply to mac users as well?
hey funnily enough i made a group on this matter today, for some readon i am STILL set on the 60 pics an album and so are all of my friends (mainly from the UK)
does this have anything to do with it (UK i mean) and if not how do i set it to 200 pics.
please Email me with any info,
thanx Jay Welsh
Sorri, Email is Jasonwelsh85@hotmail.com
I have over 200 ALbums on facebook, some of which are split up albums of the same things. WHO is going to sit and flip through an album of 200 pictures?
More grease! But my major problem is that i can’t even upload more than one picture. How do i go about it
i can only upload 5 pics at a time my sister can upload heeps an i was wonderin wat i need to do to be able upload 60 at a time