Last Updated on April 20, 2020
Facebook users most probably noticed by now that there’s a new lightbox type photo viewer which gets enabled by default and which can’t be disabled (apparently). At least, Facebook didn’t provide the users with any option of switching that off. The feedback on this “improvement” is not great at all. That’s a polite way of saying so many users are discontent, so I think Facebook is going to give their members a switch-off solution pretty soon. However, that’s only my lucky guess. Maybe the Theater Viewer was enforced for a reason, so we might never be able to turn it off from a Facebook menu.
Do you want to get rid of it? Here are a few ways:
1. Disable the “Theater Mode” photo viewer directly from its URL address:
After you click on a photo in Facebook, look at its URL address in browser. It will be something like
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/photo.php?fbid=10150100833538099&set=a.472337743098.253837.162547318098&theater
Delete &theater from the end of that string and press Enter. You’ll see the photo as you used to in the old Facebook photo viewer. Now you can click Next and Back to browse through the photos in the album.
2. Open the photo in a new browser tab
Instead of using left-click to enlarge a photo, use Right-click, then choose Open in new tab. It will open without activating the Facebook Theater Viewer.
3. Reload the photo
After you click on a photo, right-click it in the Theater Mode and choose Reload from the menu. It will reload in the old viewer.
The same result will be obtained if instead of right-clicking, you press directly F5 on your keyboard to reload the web page in your browser.
I heard that there are some browser add-ons which you can install and which will get you rid of the Facebook Theater mode viewer for good, but I’m not so keen about installing things that might slow down my computer, when I can get the same result another way.
Great, except that all the workarounds are only temporary. I for one don’t want to keep removing “theater” every time I want to see a photo. The F5 refresh thing only works until you go back to the photo gallery. I don’t necessarily want to view the photos in order or all of them. I like to click on one to zoom it in, and then click “back” on my mouse to return to the gallery and choose another. I can still do this with the new photo viewer but it’s slower and way uglier.
If you use Safari, you can install the Facebook FotoFixer extension that we just released. It kills the new photo display system and brings you back to the old version.
http://kulapartners.com/2011/03/facebook-fotofixer-extension-for-safari/
Hope you enjoy.
Jeff, that’s awesome! Thank you for the tip. Is there any chance you’ll make it work with other browsers in the future?
Thanks! We couldn’t find anything for Safari that did this, so that’s why we built it. There are already Chrome and FF scripts that will remove it in those browsers (not sure about IE).
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ngacolkajcnkbmgfnfeocjpbeikgejll?hl=en
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebookphototheaterkiller/
Thank you—awesome trick.