But everyone needs to see this LOLCAT!

January 16, 2010 5:01 AM

Does Facebook's iPhone app block you from posting images you have saved in Safari?

1. Open a website in Safari.
2. Tap and hold on an image and save it to your library.
3. Start the Facebook app.
4. Click the camera icon to post a photo
5. Select the image you just downloaded

When I perform these steps, nothing is displayed but a black screen. If I attempt to upload it, the app responds with an error message; not a crash, just a message that the image would not upload.

I have tested this with images from several websites, with the same results. Yet, the Facebook app will post images that are shot from my iphone's camera with no problem.

I suspect that the iPhone is tagging images saved from Safari, specifically to make It possible to prevent what I was trying to do (post an image I saved from a website).

I'm not looking for a technical workaround; I would just like to know if my suspicions are correct.

posted by DWRoelands to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: I see this on my iPhone too, but note that it also happens with screenshots I've taken.

I'm going to suggest incompetence, not maliciousness. In the published APIs, there's no way to "tag" or otherwise flag an image as it goes into the library -- you just pass in a UIImage, in one of two formats -- .png or .jpeg. Almost everything in the camera roll is jpeg, the link between the safari pix and the screenshots is that they're both .png

I'm guessing that the Facebook app just assumes the camera roll is only going to return .jpgs, and when it returns a .png (saved from Safari or by the screenshot app), it borks.
posted by bonaldi at 7:31 AM on January 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I never considered that the images
might be saved in different formats. Thanks!
posted by DWRoelands at 8:41 AM on January 16, 2010