How can I improve image quality for photos displayed on Facebook?
Asked 6/5/2014
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2 answers
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I export photos from Lightroom and upload them to a Facebook page. The images look noticeably worse in Facebook’s standard/theater view than the originals, with visible JPEG artifacts and loss of detail, while fullscreen sometimes looks better.
Are there any practical steps I can take before uploading to reduce Facebook’s visible compression damage? For example:
- exporting to certain pixel dimensions
- using different JPEG compression settings
- preparing the image so Facebook’s recompression causes fewer artifacts
- any Facebook setting or page option that allows higher-quality display
If not, is the best approach to avoid using Facebook as the main image host?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
12y ago
2 Answers
8
There are a few tricks that can help, but you'll never get the same quality out of facebook as you would from a site that allows larger files without compressing them so aggressively.
Here's a link to a facebook help page that describes some of the issues. Expand the section titled "How can I make sure that my photos display in the highest possible quality?"
Size your photos to either 720, 960 (seems to work best), or 2048 on the long side. If you can compress them yourself to below 100KB then facebook will not compress them any further. At least when you do the compression you can have more control over how it is compressed.
Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user15871
12y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Facebook heavily recompresses uploaded photos, so you usually won’t match the quality of the original file. The most useful steps mentioned are:
- Export to Facebook-friendly sizes on the long edge: 720, 960, or 2048 px. 960 px was reported to work especially well.
- If you can compress the JPEG yourself to a very small file size before upload, Facebook may recompress less or not at all, which gives you more control over artifacts.
- There doesn’t appear to be a special “photographer page” option that forces higher-quality theater-mode display.
In practice, the most reliable solution is not to use Facebook as your primary photo host. Many photographers upload links to images hosted on their own site or another service so they can control quality better.
A niche workaround mentioned for graphics/pixel art is extreme upscaling with nearest-neighbor to align with JPEG block behavior, but that’s generally not practical for normal photos.
So: optimize export dimensions and JPEG settings for Facebook, but if image quality really matters, host the photos elsewhere and share them via Facebook.
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