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Why Do My Photos Look Different on Facebook

by Bethany (follow)

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Facebook is one of the easiest ways to share photos with friends and family, or to get them out to your followers for an event, organisation or business.

However, many people realise shortly after posting a photo or album on Facebook that the images don't seem to have the same quality or look as the original image. Or perhaps you’ve downloaded a picture from Facebook, only to discover that it’s grainier than you remember the original to be. This can be a problem, especially when you are sharing your photos for professional reasons such as building exposure or to attract clients.

There are several things to keep in mind when uploading photos to Facebook, including how to organise your photos, choosing how they display on your page, and the size and quality of your images.

Uploading Photos

Because Facebook needs to accommodate for hundreds and thousands of photos being uploaded every day, photos are compressed into a more manageable size when they are uploaded. Here are some ways to make sure your photos look as close to the original as possible:

Size and Format

Photos less than 100KB will not be compressed. Try sticking to JPEG files rather than PNG files, because JPEGs are smaller.

JPEGs using sRGB colour profiles rather than Adobe RGB appear best on Facebook. Check your colour space setting in camera to make sure it's set to sRGB.

A filter will be automatically applied over images that are uploaded using smartphones which you may or may not like the look of, but it definitely changes the final look of the photo. You can remove this by sliding your finger over the image back to the right hand side of the screen, or disable the feature altogether by turning it off in your Facebook settings.

Facebook will also resize your images to fit their supported size ranges. It’s better to resize your own photos in Photoshop before uploading them, to optimise the quality of the photo that appears in Facebook. The supported sizes are:

720 px
960 px
2048 px (“High Quality” option; will take longer to upload)

These compression and sizes apply to profile pictures and cover photos as well, although cover images have a different size to fit the header behind your profile picture (851 px x 315 px).

High Quality

There is the option of uploading your photos in High Quality onto Facebook. It takes much longer than uploading a regular photo, but the images will be clearer, crisper, and much better quality. This will benefit you if you’re planning to download them again later.

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