How can I improve photo quality on Facebook?

March 20, 2010 8:58 AM

What is the best way to ensure better quality picture uploads to Facebook?

Every time I upload pictures to Facebook the resulting image appears blurred and suffers a decrease in quality from the original. I'm assuming that this has to do with Facebook re-sizing the pictures during the upload process. What size of picture is ideal for uploading to FB? Any other suggestions on how to improve the quality of the end result?

posted by Tenacious.Me.Tokyo to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

As of a few weeks ago, the largest size of an image allowed on Facebook is 720 pixels, so it might be worth resizing your photos so that's the maximum length.
posted by chorltonmeateater at 9:04 AM on March 20, 2010

It's not just resizing. The JPEG standard supports multiple quality levels. They recompress the images to a lower quality to make them smaller to save on bandwidth. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about it.
posted by AaRdVarK at 9:58 AM on March 20, 2010

Apparently a width of 590 px will prevent FB from compressing your image, but my only source for that is vague internet wisdom.
Facebook does resize the longest side to 604 pixels, so it has a ring of truth to it.
posted by domographer at 10:13 AM on March 20, 2010

Resize down to 720px yourself to minimize the changes their server makes.
posted by djb at 11:11 AM on March 20, 2010

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posted by p3on at 4:15 PM on March 20, 2010

Do the resizing yourself and be sure to chose bicubic or lanczos (and not bilinear or nearest neighbor) as the resampling algorithm.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:18 PM on March 20, 2010