Many users of Facebook in India were surprised to find a small ‘camera’ icon next to their comment boxes under posts made by others.
Indeed, India is one of the early markets to receive the feature, which started rolling out overnight.
The feature allows commenters to upload jpeg or png files as part of their comments to illustrate their points. Earlier, the only way to bring pictures into Facebook comments was to share the hyperlink of the picture.
If the picture turned out not to be present anywhere on the Internet, then you had to upload it to Facebook albums, and then share the url (address) of the particular picture in the comment.
Not surprisingly, many people chose to forego the picture option, given how cumbersome it was before today. With the new system, photos can be uploaded directly into the comment, and are presented ‘in line’ without any hyperlinks or deviations.
It is possible to have text and photo in the same Facebook comment too.
It may be noted that it was already possible to share pictures as posts, but people who wanted to ‘respond in kind’ to such posts were at a loss, as they could not comment on a picture with another. The new feature will make the playground ‘level’ between the poster and the commenter (who often begs to differ.)
Interestingly, unlike earlier roll-outs like the Timelines, Facebook has chosen to be very quiet about this feature. However, reports indicate that the feature may not be available to all users initially, while it is tested.
The photo feature is likely to add power to comment warriors who spend a large part of their day commenting on Facebook posts.
It may remembered Twitter introduced photo sharing in its microblogging service years ago.