Do NOT use Facebook as your hosting service for your photos, if linking them to other sites

[ricktas]

I did something I had not even thought of doing yesterday.

I had loaded this photo (http://www.ausphotography.net.au/forum/showthread.php?101049-The-End-of-the-World) to my facebook page, the exact same JPG file as is in my AP thread.

Whilst with friends yesterday, one of my friends asked if they could put a copy on their website, a blog, and I agreed. As they had it open on FB, they right clicked it and used the save image as option, to download it

Then I noticed!

The file on AP is 243KB (as uploaded), and if it is downloaded from AP, it is 243kb. But the copy my friend grabbed off FB is 65.1kb. Now I get that some compression is going to happen, but that level of compression is really going to start affecting the 'viewable' qualities of the photo, as I, the photographer intended it to be, as a web uploaded file.

Certainly I knew FB compressed photos that were uploaded, but really did not know how much they did so.

If you are using FB to host your photos and link to other sites, think again, you are losing so much quality due to FB's compression handling of your images that it really is not a good choice.

[JohnB5319]

Rick,

Was the photo saved as 'High Quality'?

John

[Tommo224]

Facebook tends to annihilate the quality of photos. Pretty sure even if you have "high quality" selected.

That may have changed over the last few weeks though, as the photo viewing thing changed yet again. So I don't know now, but yeah, it's smashes the quality quite noticably.

Shame though, as it's so easy to share with everyone you know through there if you upload as an album. Posting as a link hosted elsewhere doesn't always do as well for me lol.


However, when I know I'm going to link on forums I put it on my own server =] I never thought of using facebook as a remote link before? I thought they'd be blocked if you weren't "friends" or something

[geoffsta]

For me thats a good thing... I rather upload to facebook knowing if someone wanted to pinch it. They would end up with a pretty crappy copy.
I never thought to use FB as a shared thing. :umm:

[Art Vandelay]

Facebook tends to be so erratic it's not funny. I regularly update family photos etc on there using the previous max of 720, and more recently the new max of 960. Sometimes they look great, other times crap. Leads me to believe their compression rates arent a static value, more like the value changes at random....or some contrived recipe only known to Zuckerberg's inner circle. :)