Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner, said the move would bring Facebook "up to speed" with other photo-sharing services. Its previous photo viewer "seemed to be kind of a tacky addition to what is otherwise a nicely laid out service," he said.

He sees the changes as part of Facebook's ongoing efforts to keep users on its platform for longer.

"Google, Facebook and Apple are all trying to expand their own feature sets so they can keep users on their sites," he said. "It is competition, but not over photo sharing per se."

Facebook's newly launched photo-viewing features currently work in up-to-date Chrome and Firefox Web browsers only. Users can upload photographs with a maximum resolution of 2048-by-2048 pixels.

The IDG News Service