Facebook just started rolling out a new look to its user Photos page that includes a mosaic view featuring all of a user's photos, as well as three new tabs that adorn the top of the page: photos of you, photos you've shared, and albums you've created. The new photos view appears to be the work of the design team within Facebook that created Facebook Camera, a wholly independent photos app that launched May 24th. Facebook has increasingly placed an emphasis on higher quality, bigger photos.
Facebook's grid photo view has been long due for an update and hasn't changed much recently — even after Timeline profiles launched in late 2011. The new view incorporates Timeline functionality by letting you actively highlight and edit posts within the photo viewer. Highlighting a photo here will create a page-width photo layout for that image on your Timeline profile. If you hover your mouse over a photo, you can Like, comment, star, or edit a photo within a convenient pop-up module. Albums also get a detail view that align them much more closely with Facebook's Timeline profile pages, while streamlining editing options.
The new photo viewer undeniably looks like Google+'s photo viewer (pictured below), as well as many popular themes inside both Tumblr and Blogger. With the update, Facebook is clearly saying that the days of a static grid view are over. The company is also saying that it's still keen on rolling out updates inspired by other sites — still one of the characteristics that makes Facebook so tough to compete with.
Facebook said that the update will roll out over the next few weeks to all of its users worldwide. The company didn't say when or if the new mosaic view would roll out to its mobile apps.