Best quality images on Facebook

Ever noticed how your images can look really bad on Facebook? We have. And since so many people use Facebook as part of their online presence for their photography business, we set out to get down to the bottom of it. What we found was surprising, and changed the way we prep images for Facebook. Here are our findings.

Because sooo many people upload sooo many photos to Facebook each day they had to come up with a sneaky way to reduce the timeline load time and also not clog up their servers. A while back this post surfaced. Give it a read, I dare ya!

Because of this Facebook has to be more aggressive with compression than we would prefer them be — for them every KB matters. But for us every pixel matters. So finding that balance between image size (number of pixels) and file size (number of bytes) is critical. They did give us this handy-dandy piece of info to help us achieve the best quality images on Facebook.

BlogStomp settings for Facebook!

Settings > Styles:
– Longest Edge > 2048*
– JPEG Quality > 85

Easy right? Use these settings and your photos will be perfect with no compression!!

Right??

Unfortunately not. Facebook will still compress your photo. But using their recommended settings will result in less compression than not. And we just want to help you put the best foot forward.

PS. This guide will likely change as Facebook updates their software and policies. We’ll try to keep up to date and do the ground work for you. If you stumble across those updates before us, let us know.

* (Please bear in mind that none but the largest high-resolution monitors will actually display your images at this size.  Facebook will likely ALWAYS resize EVERY image to fit your browser window. It’s great that Facebook will allow such large images, but if you’re not going to be able to view/show them above 1200px or so, you may just want to Stomp them at 1200px or so and save on the file size. Just our two cents…)

Happy Stomping!!