Looking to upload larger photos on Facebook? It’s now possible thanks to Facebook rolling out some features first announced in January. Images have now been increased “by almost 20 percent to 720 pixels to give [users] higher quality photos”. While on the surface this isn’t a big deal, Facebook run the largest online photo storage product which means this is a relatively substantial technical feat.
While the photos being uploaded on the site will support the increased size, Facebook states that “some external applications may continue to use the previous size”. So if you are uploading an image from you iPhone, don’t expect that Facebook is going to increase the size of the photo by default. Facebook also announced in January that the company will resize profile photos, although that still hasn’t been rolled out yet.
At this point we aren’t quite sure when Facebook will launch the new photo size, but it’s clear that the company has delayed the process for rolling out the new page and profile tab widths in addition to profile photos. For now, users can upload larger photos on the site and that’s all the changes taking place. We’ll have to wait and see when Facebook decides to push out resized profiles though.
Looking forward to this. The image quality was the one big thing keeping me from uploading strictly to Flickr.
Excellent. It just keeps getting better!
I’m glad Facebook is rolling out higher resolutions since it is such a huge sharing platform. However, I wouldn’t give up on Flickr, Picasa and the like just yet. With even the most rudimentary camera phones taking 640×480 and most significantly larger 720 pixels, is as Nick says, is more of a technical feat than a real feature addition. 20% more storage and 20% more bandwidth to serve the images is really what the big difference is.
I would add that 720 pixels doesn’t really make print quality photos. It would be interesting if they allowed for higher resolutions and then you could purchase a print (much like other sharing platforms). I guess the good news is the increased resolution will vastly improve the quality of the the send to fax feature http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/facebook-now-lets-you-fax-your-photos-i-have-no-idea-why-anyone-would-want-to-do-this/ (yes I know it was a joke)
The question is, when can we save the larger photos in our applications (from Flash etc)? They say early 2010, not very precise.
Would be nice if they also updated the iPhoto exporter as well so that it can also upload at this new size. I tried using Facebook’s own photo uploader the other day for the first time in ages, and I found it not entirely reliable!
It would be VERY nice if the older photos could be resized to the larger size because I sometimes upload photos to already established albums and now I’ll probably have some photos of different sizes in various albums. Talk about annoying!!! (But, I’m glad for the larger upload size regardless.)