Facebook has created its own rendition of the friend and family slideshow. The social network unveiled a new feature on Monday that lets several users contribute photographs to one single album.

Aptly called "shared albums," this feature is especially helpful to those who want to show photos from a recent family vacation, group camping trip, wedding, or another people-filled event. Before today, Facebook users could only upload photos to albums they created on their own profiles.

To get started on shared albums, a central user can create an album and then add Facebook friends as contributors. These friends can then add, view, and edit photos in the album. However, the contributors can only edit or delete photos they themselves upload.

"Right now, if you were at a party and there were three different albums created, you might not be able to see all the photos [based on privacy settings], which is kind of confusing and frustrating," Facebook software engineer Bob Baldwin told Mashable.

The new shared albums have three possible viewing settings: contributors only, friends of contributors, and public. According to Mashable, album creators can invite as many as 50 friends to join the album and each person can add up to 200 photos.

"I think one thing that's really fun about creating products at Facebook is that you're never quite sure how people will use the product in the end," Baldwin told Mashable. "We're really excited for launch because we think people will use [shared albums] in ways that we're not even thinking of."

The shared album feature began rolling out to a small group of users in English-language countries on Monday. According to Mashable, the feature will eventually expand to all users.

(Source : news.cnet.com)