How to Work Around Facebook’s New Photo Viewer

Facebook is undoubtedly one of the largest and most widely used social media platforms in the world. It is used by millions of people every day to connect with friends and family, share photos and videos, and keep up with the latest news and trends. However, Facebook is also known for introducing changes to its user interface that can be frustrating for some users. One such change that has recently been rolled out is the new photo viewer.

The new photo viewer on Facebook has some advantages, such as the ability to pop over the content without losing your place and the improved navigation controls. However, many users have reported that they do not like the fact that they can no longer right-click on the image to grab its URL or do a “save as”. Fortunately, there are ways around the new image viewer that will allow you to still grab the URLs or save images, or even bypass the new viewer completely and view photos like you used to be able to. In this article, we will explore some of the tricks and tips that you can use to work around Facebook’s new photo viewer.

F5 to Reload the Page

A simple way to kill the new photo viewer is once you’ve clicked on an image and have the new viewer up, click the F5 button on your keyboard. This will reload the page and close out the viewer. What you’ll now get is the “old” way of viewing photos on Facebook. This is a quick and easy solution for those who do not want to deal with the new photo viewer.

CTRL + Clicking

Instead of just clicking on an image to view it, you can hold down your CTRL button as you click. This will open the image in a new tab in your browser, minus the ugly photo viewer. This trick lets you view photos in the old way without having to reload the page entirely.

Facebook Image Link for Google’s Chrome Browser

Chrome users can download a new plug-in that will add additional context menu options when you right-click on an image posted on Facebook. The new photo viewer was introduced a little over a week ago, and amongst the most common complaints about it is that right-clicking a photo no longer gives you the option to copy the photo’s web address. That makes it a lot more difficult to display images individually or to save them to the local computer system.

With Facebook Image Link installed, the options added to the context menu include: Open image URL, Show image URL, and Show high res image URL. If you are using Google Chrome, this plug-in is a must-have to get around the new photo viewer on Facebook.

Facebook Photo Theater Killer

Userscripts like the Facebook Photo Theater Killer create another way to circumvent the Facebook photo theater. This Greasemonkey script will essentially replace the new photo viewer with the older viewer that is still accessible. However, it’s not known if or how long Facebook will keep the old viewer up and running, so if Facebook disables the old viewer, this userscript will break. But for now, it’s a good work-around and is the only option at the moment that will automatically prevent the opening of photos in their new photo viewer.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Facebook’s new photo viewer has its pros and cons. However, for those who prefer to use the old viewer or need to grab URLs or save images frequently, the tips and tricks mentioned in this article are invaluable. These tricks can help you bypass the new viewer completely and view photos the way you used to be able to. If you have any other solutions you’ve come across, please share them in the comments. We’d love to hear them, and we’re sure our readers would as well.