Facebook is quite possibly the most popular platform out there when it comes to sharing photos. The problem is that Facebook also tends to prioritize images that load quickly over images that are high in quality. You cannot actually stop this from happening, but you can do your part to try and minimize the amount of quality you are losing.
Why Does Facebook Reduce your Image Quality?
When you upload an image to Facebook, it will be resized and it will be formatted. This means that it can easily be displayed both on the Facebook website, and the app properly. Unless you upload your image so that it is 476px wide by 714px tall, Facebook will need to scale it. The problem here is that even if you do upload your photo at this resolution, it’s going to look bad if someone clicks on it, to zoom in. So how do you get around this?
How to Boost the Quality of your Facebook Photos
First of all, you need to try and make sure that you are uploading images in the right size. This lowers the amount of resizing that Facebook needs to do. Ideally, your photo needs to be 2048px wide, as this is the size Facebook will use when blowing up your image when clicked. Next, you need to choose the right color space. Facebook uses the standard color profile for a lot of displays. You don’t need to change much here, as sRGB is used in over 99% of JPEG images. If you take a photo with your phone, or if you use a major editing app, chances are it’s still going to be in the sRGB color scheme.
Facebook’s 500KB Compression
Facebook tends to compress images to 500KB, which is incredibly small. Even if you upload an image under 500KB, it’ll still get compressed. For this reason, you need to avoid compressing the image yourself. Instead, you need to upload the highest-quality image possible. If it gets compressed, you should be able to retain a lot of the quality. If you want to take quality photos on your phone, check out www.backlightblog.com.
High Quality and Normal Quality
Facebook has two different quality options when it comes to uploading images. You have normal quality, and you have high quality. Normal quality is used for just about anything, whether it’s a profile picture or a status update. High quality is only available if you upload images to an album. If you are serious about uploading quality images, upload them to an album and from there, share them. When you upload to an album, make sure that the high-quality option is enabled. You can set this to default if you want to make things easier for yourself in the future.
If you can begin to understand the options that are available to you when uploading your photos and if you can understand how Facebook compression works, there’s no reason why you can’t begin to see an improvement in your photo quality.