Facebook announced shared photo albums on Monday, a feature that has long been requested on the world's most popular social network. The new feature will allow multiple users to contribute photo uploads to the same album, with privacy settings that include public, friends of contributors and contributors only. 

"Hundreds of millions of photos are uploaded on to Facebook each day and today, we're making it even easier for friends to share photos with the rollout of Shared Photo Albums," Facebook told Pocket-lint. "Whether you're at a wedding, birthday party, or fresh off of a trip, all your friends will be able to add photos, tag photos and edit just one album."

The album creator can share access with 50 contributors, for a total of 200 photos. We can see this coming in handy for plenty of events. For example, a family cookout's photo album can be populated with photos from everyone who attended, rather than just the host. In a world of smartphone cameras, it wouldn't be too hard to reach 200 photos in an album either.

Shared photo albums will begin rolling out to users in the US on Monday, with international markets to follow in the coming days. Facebook told Mashable the feature was built during the company-wide hackathon sessions, spearheaded by employees Bob Baldwin and Fred Zhao. They said hackathons are often the place where new prototypes for the platform are dreamed up. We wonder if some of the Instagram team also contributed. 

Facebook isn't the first to the shared photo albums party, and we're actually surprised it took this long. Earlier this summer, Apple announced Photo Streams within iOS 7 have received shared photo streams, where you can post photos, videos and comments to your stream, and it all appears on everyone’s iOS devices — automatically. What would be really cool is if Facebook photos were integrated into the core of iOS 7. One can certainly dream.