3 Ideas to make the photo app even better.

1. Improve your tagging system.

Tagging photos isn’t such a big deal when your working with 5-15 photos but once you go up from there, it can be extremely time consuming. There’s times when I’ve snapped 50 photos at the same party with most of the same people. I want to be able to tag the album as “Party, Jen’s House, Keg” and have it searchable should I decide to make it public. That way, the next day when I want to view some photos of the party, I can search for the tag “Jen’s house” and up comes everybody’s photos.

There’s an annoying back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard when tagging. You click the persons face, start typing their username, jump back to the mouse and hit the checkbox. Sounds simple enough but if your tagging 60 photos and on average 3-4 people per photo, it can become really annoying. If your a little savvy you’ve probably noticed you can tab into the drop down menu and hit spacebar, instead of switching back to the mouse. However, facebook likes to skip the first name when you tab in, which sucks, because it’s usually the name that’s most relevant. So here’s a potential improvement, when your typing in the name and relevant results start pulling up, attach a number as a hotkey next to their name to tag them. Kinda like below, this way you don’t have to mouse to a small checkbox 4x per photo.

I could also see how a bulk tagging system with a drag and drop interface could work. For example, you could build up tagging palette of friends, then drag and drop their thumbnail onto the image to quickly tag. Here’s a quick mockup of what that might look like.

2. Save my image at multiple resolutions, and give me the option to view at full resolution.

I understand the bandwidth concern and the increase cost this might induce, but hey..Flickr’s been doing this for years. Technology in cameras are getting better and costing less, but you couldn’t really tell on facebook because the down sampling of the photos. It’d be tolerable if facebook had an option to view different sizes ( like Flickr ) but it flat out doesn’t. What’s the deal?

3. Please let me take my photos out of the black hole.

What goes in Facebook doesn’t come out. That’s right, as of right now all your photos are stuck inside the magical fantasy land of Facebook. Why can’t I dynamically feed my most recent facebook photos onto my blog, export my photos to my iPod, or give users the option to subscribe to my photo feed. What’s the dealio

I hope some of these get implemented, it’s rather depressing taking 200 photos with an expensive SLR, narrowing them down to 40 solids, uploading them, tagging them, watching the quality degrade, then not being able to move them anywhere. Facebook, here’s a start to improving your already awesome photo app.