Do Pictures Lose Quality When Uploaded to Facebook?

By Melly Parker

Clean, crisp photos help you showcase your important moments.
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Facebook Photos enables users to create albums to share pictures and video with Facebook connections and even those without a Facebook account. In the past, photos have lost quality when uploaded to Facebook, appearing grainy and lower-quality than those that were uploaded. Facebook has taken steps to change the photo quality problem, however.

Photo Sizes

In order for a site like Facebook to save thousands of photos every day, if a photo is too large, Facebook will automatically compress it to reduce the file size.

Each photo must be less than 100 KB to avoid compression. Images saved as JPG are smaller than those saved as PNG; also, Facebook states that JPG images with an sRGB color profile will appear best on the site.

Resizing Photos

When you upload photos to Facebook, Facebook automatically changes the size to one supported by the site. If you want to resize your own photo to optimize the resulting Facebook image, you should resize it according to Facebook's supported sizes. For normal photos, Facebook supports 720 px, 960 px and 2048 px -- for the 2048 px size, choose the option "Hi Quality" when uploading. For cover images, Facebook supports 851 px by 315 px.

Uploading High Quality

Uploading high quality images takes much longer than uploading smaller, compressed images, and Facebook has a warning to that effect when you create an album. However, the resulting images will be clearer, have cleaner lines and will look much better. If you're planning to save the images from Facebook to your computer later, upload in high quality so you can download them again in the best possible detail.

Uploading Photos

Depending on how you want to share your photos, you have several uploading options. If you have one photo that you want to show your followers, you can attach it to a status, at which point it will appear in your contacts' news feeds and on your timeline and will also go into the Wall Photos album. If you choose to share photos from your mobile device and don't specify a folder, the photos are put on your timeline either as an individual photo or, if you upload more than one at a time, as a group in the Mobile Uploads album.

You can also create photo albums or share a photo as a profile picture or as your cover photo. The same compression and sizing rules apply to all pictures except your cover photo, which is sized differently to fit the screen behind your profile picture.

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