Why must Facebook hate us all? (especially small business)
Anyway if you’re like me you’re beyond frustrated with how much Facebook compresses and degrades the quality of the images we take. This may be a good point to mention that if you’re just posting selfies using those horrible front facing cameras this post will not appeal to you.
But for the rest of us who take the time to compose and edit even our images shot with smartphones this is become infuriating. I get it… over 500 million images are uploaded to Facebook every single day. Perhaps they use some of that half of a trillion-dollar market cap to pay our buddy Jeff Bezos for some more server space.
Finally fed up I decided to do some quick testing here during my lunch.
I decided that I would compare the two main ways to post a photo to Facebook.
- Upload it directly to Facebook and watch the amazing image quality of my full frame dslr go to shit.
- Upload the same full resolution file to my website and link the image to my Facebook feed.
Here is what I learned:
When it comes to the preview image Facebook uses a MUCH higher resolution than the preview created when I like to my website. Here is a screen shot test.
The top image was the image directly loaded to Facebook and the bottom is linked from my website. The easiest place to notice the difference in quality are the power lines in the top left hand corner of the photo.
Now here is the dilemma. If you click to enlarge the image that was uploaded directly to Facebook it looks like it was taken with a Motorola Razr. If you don’t know what that is google it.
When you click on the image linked from my webpage you get a beautiful super high-resolution jpg image which is how myself and tons of photographers would like to have them viewed. (plus it gives us a hit on our website)
So I thought to myself why can’t I have both. So I uploaded the image to a post directly to Facebook but I also included the direct link to the image and it turned out like this.
Does this work? Sure. But only if your viewer is really paying attention. (News Flash: None of them are). And what I mean by that is this. If you click on that ugly URL at the top you’ll get the full resolution image you hoped that everyone would see. BUT if you click the image itself you’re linked to the uploaded over-compressed image on Facebook that again. Is absolute trash.
So forgive me if the title of this post was misleading but I need to start a dialogue on this in hopes that there is a better way to accomplish hosting high-resolution images on Facebook.
Let me google that for you.
And for all of your who made it this far… Here is the high resolution image. Enjoy.
