Get Rid of Facebook Photo Theater Mode and Move Back to Old Photo Viewer

Facebook has rolled out a new feature "Facebook Photo Viewer". When you click on an image, it will automatically pops up as new layer on screen. You can close it either by pressing the "ESC key" or navigate using the arrow keys.

This feature enables the user to photos in high resolution instead of regular ones. The new photo viewer is actually known as "Photo Theater" and is a lightweight, ultra-fast photo rendering application that was designed with most care to provide better photo viewing experience.



Want to see how the Photo Theater actually works, visit the Facebook engineering’s note where you can see the detailed information from the programming point of view.

However, a lot of people may not like this feature, as this picture frame occupies a lot of space on the Facebook Profile page when opened.

How to Disable Facebook Photo Theater?

Solution 1: Simply Refresh the browser when the photo opened in theater mode.

Solution 2: Whenever an image is opened in theater mode, look for the word “&theater” in the URL and delete it. Now press enter, so that it will open the photo in the regular format. And then, you can start browsing the photos as usual.

Solution 3: Install Facebook Photo Theater Killer Userscript for Greasemonkey - Mozilla and Chrome

The above said solutions (1 and 2) are temporary and so when you go back it and opened an image, it will again pops up in theater mode. So, the 3rd one is the best solution for this problem.