&theater – how to get rid of the new facebook theater view for pictures
Facebook has just started using the new theater view. Its supposedly an upgrade to their photo view system which might save users and facebook some data bandwidth. But in all honesty, its FUGLY!!
owh and if you don’t know what fugly means . . .urbandictionary is your best friend =)
Back to the point, heres a screenshot of the different photo views:
Although its meant to be an upgrade and i can really see it working its not so good. I see how they’ve maybe tried to make it look better and more like a flash gallery, with a faded background, but the black background just looks UGLY !! Also you can click anywhere to go to the next picture, while to go back to the previous one, you have to carefully align your mouse pointer to the back arrow and click and hope it doesn’t go to the next picture.
So here I’m going to list the ways I’ve discovered, been told, or just found online to get rid of the new theater view.
The URL edit:
If you look closely at the url while viewing a photo in the new theater mode you will notice it ends with ‘&theater’. Well just simply delete ‘&theater’ and press enter. You will be back to the normal photo view.
The F5 refresh:
The simplest way by far, is to simply refresh the page. It can easily be done by pressing F5 and BAAM you are back to the old photo view. Notice that the ‘&theater’ is still in the URL, however you are back in the view type.
The New TAB:
Another great way to get rid of the theater view is to simply right click on the photo and open in a new tab. This will by default open picture in a new tab in the old photo view type.
Greasemonkey:
Greasemonkey is a great addon for Firefox, that is now also available for Chrome. It allows you to add custom scripts and provides a great resource for a large variety of possibilities.
The facebook photo theater killer . . .available at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/96773 . . . is a greasemonkey script that while in use will automatically only open the facebook photos in the old photo view type.
Greasemonkey can be downloaded for firefox here at : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
Greasemonkey for Chrome (called Greasemetal) is available here at: http://www.mychromeaddons.com/chrome-addon-greasemetal-greasemonkey-for-chrome/
=)
JustAnotherBlogPage 
The problem is that I know how to get rid of this ugly display, but when I upload pictures to FB, I want to make sure that my friends don’t have to look at that ugly display. Today I uploaded some pictures and the damn theater display disappeared the caption and the navigation arrows. That’s probably what my friends were seeing too.
Can I rig it from my end to make sure my photos don’t display like that, no matter who’s looking at them?
Aaaaarrrgghhhh!!!
So far, there is no way to select what display facebook uses to display your photos. By default facebook uses the &theatre, personally i believe they should let you select which display you would like to use for every album.
Your friends will see the &theatre display unless they use one of the methods suggested above. =)
Yeah, I figured that. Rats!
&theatre – seems like facebook changed this in the past days. By removing &theatre you won’t get the real pic anymore, any idea?
hey, just checked again, the &theater is only visible in the actual album view, and is not visible while viewing something straight out of the news feed.
so if you access an album, then all these methods still work however clicking on tagged pictures in teh news feed, retains the facebook homepage url =)