How To Go Back To Old Photo Album Viewer In Facebook – Solution / Work Around

Facebook recently introduced a new feature, lightbox enabled, theater like photo album viewer. Those who do not like this, there are various ways you can get rid of this (the solutions listed below are just a work around, they may stop functioning at some point in time):

1> Instead of directly clicking on the image, if you right click and open the image in a new Tab or a new Window, the photos will not be displayed with the theater effect.

2> If you directly click on the image, the photo will be displayed with the theater effect. Now, the URL will look something like:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150147916455152&set=a.10150147915660152.333563.787165151&theater

Strip off &theater from the URL and the URL will look something like :

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150147916455152&set=a.10150147915660152.333563.787165151

Hit Enter. This will reload the image in the same page, but without the theater effect. This reloads the same page twice, so bandwidth wise may not be the best work around.

3> This one is again after directly clicking on the image, the image will be opened with theater effect. Press F5 or reload the page, and you’ll not have the theater effect anymore. Again, not very economical, if you look at it from Facebook’s point of view.

All these seem to be bugs that have gone untested from FaceBook’s side (guess we all have great future as Software Testers and FaceBook should employ us ;)), which should be fixed soon in the future updates. If any of you have a better solution, please let me know through the comments.