The news arrived recently that Facebook videos are now available in high definition.
Facebook’s videos also have an embedding option now, for viewers to watch on external sites. The new features show just how serious Facebook is about catching up with YouTube, which just recently announced HD video uploads as well.
While Facebook is making steady improvement to becoming a premier player in online video, I feel it’s leaving the company’s real star product lagging behind in the mud: Photos. Facebook is by far the king of photo storage, sharing and viewing online. With close to 2 billion pictures, the site continues to add over 60 million more every week.
But the photo portion of the site is as stagnant as a used tic-tac-toe board.
When Facebook was relaunched with a new, wider interface only months ago, it seemed obvious that the extra space could be used for larger images and videos. Well, video is taken care of but photos seem smaller and smaller as time goes on.
Ever try using a Facebook photo for your desktop picture or to print on a calendar or fame on the wall? The quality is horrific. Even though photo size is limited to save storage space and maintain a fast load time for pages, just the option to view or download larger sizes of an image would be an amazing improvement.
Enough people have high-speed Internet, Facebook. The demand is there. Facebook could solidify its lead in online photo sharing, or, stand by and watch other companies chip away at marketshare.
Harrison Keely has been published by McClatchy-Tribune and United Press International services. He recently reported for the online and business desks of The Washington Times and contributed to the Washington Journalism Center blog InkTank.
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Facebook has lost its value to me, the only thing I liked was the status update feature, Twitter totally owns in that area though, so I opt for Twitter over Facebook these days.
Comment by Adrian Eden — January 9, 2009 @ 12:11 pm
Harrison, they have over 4 billion photos last I heard. I think increasing the file size by even a tiny percent on all the pics would VASTLY increase their bandwidth costs. they are the #1 photo site on the interwebs by far. flickr is way behind them.
Comment by Brian Breslin — January 9, 2009 @ 12:22 pm
Same as what Brian wrote, but also take into account the need to ramp up the deployment of new servers. Servers are very expensive to purchase and maintain. From what I heard a while back, Fb spends about $100million per year just on servers and related expenses. So increasing upload file sizes will have a huge impact on the company financially, especially when the economy is struggling right now.
Comment by Rev — January 9, 2009 @ 12:40 pm
I strongly agree !
Such an improvement would kill Picasaweb and Flickr overnight !
Comment by Abdullah A. Al-Ageel — January 9, 2009 @ 12:53 pm
Photos are the most interesting part of facebook. Couldn't they simply add a freemium set of features to the photo area? X photos/file size for free, $ for xtra ala flickr. It's not like such a move would drive users to another platform.
Comment by Jeff — January 9, 2009 @ 12:57 pm
From a privacy point of view, I kind of like that they don't have full-resolution images. No offense, but I don't trust my "friends" not to steal my pictures and print them for some obscene purpose.
Comment by BklynGirl — January 9, 2009 @ 1:01 pm
Sounds like a business model to me. They should charge users who want FB to be their primary photo storage and high res photo sharing site the incremental cost of buying those expensive servers and bandwidth (or more if they want to make some $$).
Comment by Dan Peguine — January 9, 2009 @ 1:21 pm
agreed! c'mon facebook… give your users better quality photos… plz?
Comment by Luka Kladaric — January 9, 2009 @ 2:25 pm
The new version of Apple iPhoto now has integrated Facebook uploading, which shows just how important photos are to Facebook users. As people become more comfortable with sharing photos online and using sites like flickr, they are are going to expect to view and download full size photos just as easily as they uploaded them.
Comment by Brad Davis Seal — January 10, 2009 @ 5:44 pm
This would be a service I'd be willing to pay for, after all I already give Flickr money for the very same thing. The present quality keeps me uploading to Flickr, and then porting across certain people focused shots to Facebook, via PikNik, to share with my family and friends. The pictures on Facebook at present are really stored at an annoyingly low resolution and quality.
Either that or outsource the whole thing to Flickr and go into partnership.. maybe Facebook tries too much re-inventing the wheel, and not enough just going to wheel makers.
Comment by Steven Jones — January 13, 2009 @ 1:59 am
I'm running a Photography Project Group in Facebook and recently I realize the low quality of the images as the same project is also in FLICKR. In 2008 the difference was not that big!!!… I started to search some answer and find this article that explains what happened. Now I'm posting in both platforms (FLCKR and FB) and linking my FB photos to my FLICKR. I am so sad about this and don't what to say to almost 200 people in the project
Comment by Arlette Montilla — January 23, 2009 @ 5:08 pm
The low-res photos are annoying, and it's also annoying that I have to install Java to upload photos on FB. Few sites any more require Java, and it's always a pain in the ass, with firewall issues when installing, bloat that takes forever for it to start up, not officially supported in Chrome, etc — AJAX would be better.
Comment by Connelly Barnes — September 15, 2009 @ 8:15 pm
Hmm.. I understand why they can't change it, but it is extremely frustrating. I mean, lots of my friends have great photos of us or me from trips or whatever, and I can never print them ro do anything with them, unless I track down the original copies of everything from everyone, which isn't so easy to do. Having a good quality picture would really be better.
Comment by Ryan — February 1, 2010 @ 2:18 am
We've just launched an app that lets you share your original hi-res photos and integrates with Facebook photos:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?v=in...
This of course doesn't change the quality of the image that Facebook shows, but it makes the original available for download. When your friends and family want a photo for their collection (and printing, which the app will offer soon), they can get the high quality original.
We're also working on "pro" albums where an option will be hi-res views. Check it out!
Comment by Jason Simmons — February 5, 2010 @ 12:42 pm
Thanks for the link, Jason! Trying this now.
Comment by bea — March 5, 2010 @ 9:01 pm