Plugin Lets Facebookers Banish Baby Photos

Unbaby.me swaps pics of babies for images of cats—or bacon
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 6, 2012 8:59 AM CDT
Plugin Lets Facebookers Banish Baby Photos
A screenshot of unbabyme.com, which has received more than 40,000 "likes" on Facebook.   (Unbabyme.com)

A trio of ad agency employees fed up with looking at their friends' baby photos on Facebook have hit on a way to replace the images with pictures of cats, bacon, or whatever the user would rather see. Unbaby.me, a plugin for the Chrome browser that launched last week, scans Facebook feeds for signs of baby photos—those signs being words like "cute" and "adorable"—then replaces the photo with one from an RSS feed of photos, reports the Los Angeles Times. The current default is cats.

Its creators are all in their late 20s or early 30s. "We were having drinks one night after work and were joking around about how Facebook is just lousy with babies, and wouldn't it be funny if you could replace all those photos with cats," one of them says. The trio have released the source code so other can create blockers for Facebook annoyances like motivational quotes. But with some tweaks, Unbaby.me can already be used to block other kinds of pictures people don't want to see in their newsfeeds, notes Will Oremus at Slate. Desk-bound workers can block friends' beach photos—or cat photos could be swapped for images of ... babies. (More Facebook stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X