If you are regular Facebook user, which I am sure most of us here are, you will notice a new feature which I believe its known as “theater”. When you click on a photo, you will not be brought to photo page anymore, instead, you will stay on the page and a theater-style photo viewer will popup for you to browse and comment on the photo.

A lot of people complaint about the new photo viewer, including my friends too, who said it is ugly and annoying. Anyway, there is actually a way to get rid of that manually.

Get Rid of The New Annoying Photo Viewer in Facebook

The most basic method is of course open the photos in new tab. For users like me who like to open a new tab for every link I click, the new photo viewer doesn’t really annoy me.

For now, there is no permanent way to stop the annoying photo viewer since Facebook did not provide us any option to disable it. However, you can get rid of it after the photo viewer pops up by pressing F5 after the photo viewer pops up!

Why would pressing F5 work?
When the photo viewer pops up, the browser address bar will be dynamically updated to something like:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=XXX&set=a.XXX&theater

which is equivalent to the URL to the photo. Therefore, by pressing F5, the browser will load the old photo viewer page using that new URL.