Ever wondered why your uploaded photos on Facebook doesn’t look half as good as the originals in your drive, camera or phone? This is because Facebook uses its own compression methods to save disk space when uploading your photos to the cloud.
While there’s no foolproof way of beating this compression on Facebook, What you can do however, is play by the rules and extract the best results possible. Here’s how.
Enable “High Quality” option when uploading new photos
Not many people are aware of this, but Facebook provides you with an option to upload high quality photos when creating a new album. This option is not enabled by default.
Step 1: To begin, simply create a new album via the Create Photo Album button easily accessible from Facebook’s Home page on the desktop version of the site.
Step 2: Now tick the check mark on the High Quality option when adding new photos to the album.
This will make sure that all photos uploaded to this album will be of considerably higher quality. However you should know that Facebook will still apply a certain level of compression to these photos, though it won’t be as bad as the default option.
Upload photos with 2048px width
If you upload a photo to Facebook with a width of 2048 pixels, you’ll find the quality of the upload to be noticeably better than normal. However this still does not in any way mean that no compression is applied. But the higher resolution can at least compensate for the compression by retaining a relatively higher photo sharpness.
Also, even when uploading photos with 2048px width, make sure you select the High Quality option as pointed out above.
Ideal dimensions for Cover Photo
For Cover Photo, Facebook recommends using photos in 851px (width) by 315px (height) dimensions. Anything less or more will not yield the ideal result you desire. So make sure you resize your photo to match this dimension before uploading to get the best possible result.
Reduce file size to 100KB
You can also avoid heavy compression on photos by Facebook by making sure the photo to be uploaded has file size of less than 100KB. You can do this yourself in any photo editing software of your choice.
You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the Web.
