Are the pictures in your Facebook album all look blurry, or out-of-focus ?
The reason is simple, your pictures are not optimized to be displayed in Facebook. Even though nowadays’ digital cameras can capture very high resolution pictures but you shall not upload your full-size pictures to Facebook album straightaway. That requires Facebook to resize the pictures to fit their page layout, and makes your pictures look blurry.
In fact, the optimal size for pictures in Facebook album is 604 pixels high (or wide). Therefore, before you upload the pictures to your newly created album in Facebook, try first resizing the picture to 604 pixels wide or high. Then, use the sharpening tool or unsharp mask within your image editing tool to sharpen the pictures. Lastly, upload those processed pictures to the album.
Update 1 : From January 20th 2010, Facebook has upgraded their photo album feature to support 720 pixels high (or wide). So if you have fast Internet connection, then why not resize the photos to 720 pixels and share those with your friends ?
Update 2 : From 2nd October 2010, Facebook upgraded their photo album to support upload of photos with 2,048 pixels. In addition, the site rolled out new uploader, friend-tagging feature and lightbox based viewer.
Update 3 : From end August, 2011 – now Facebook can display the photos up to 900 pixels (you can upload photos with bigger size, but it will downsize it to 900 pixels to display).
Update 4 : Just in case you are searching for this … the new Timeline Cover image / photo size is 850 x 315 pixels.
Here you go, one sample album from my Kyoto trip with my beloved Olympus camera (link to E-P3, but the photos were taken with E-510). Enjoy !!
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Great tips!
Very useful – i found that my pretty much crisp photos became blurred as well. I will use this from now on. Thanks Michael!
thank you for the magic number!
Hi,
Your site was found with keyword phase “facebook page photo size.” Thank you for the
)
information I needed before adding a photo to a new facebook page.
surprise that I got to be here with Google “facebook upload photo size”… XD.
Thanks mentor!
Should I switch to Flickr, or Picasa?!
Well you know, my view is always … run your own photo gallery in your own server. But then again, Flickr is better for gallery / streaming I guess.
Thank you so much! I’m currently working on a facebook fan page and I keep coming back to this lesson.
I did some playing with this a while back and found that the best bet was to use 603×402, if you want to maintain a 3:2 aspect ratio
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=245774&id=593745025&l=b6b11cf6d2
However, they seem to have changed the sizes recently. Got here by looking for new standards – will repost if I find anything.
Hi, love your work. Which photo plugin did you use for your blog to present above pics?
Hi Rika,
The plug-in is the NextGEN Gallery. Hope it helps.
Hey Mike, great informative site.
I also installed NextGEN Gallery on my site but I don’t know how to toggle the thumbnails size. Seems like you have a perfect size thumbnails but mine is a bit too small.
http://www.chinatowneats.net/
do you know how to fix that? thanks so much
Hi Peng,
For thumbnail photos, I prefer to use the default WP style. May be you can try it. Another possible reason is careful setting of the column width and # of photos in a row.
Hope it helps.
Thanks, I tried to insert a gallery from my WP uploads (with bigger thumbnails) but the images don’t have the same effect as your site. It loads as a separate page.
I want the NextGEN effect but WP default gallery like your above images.
Oh, for this effect, just install the Lightbox 2 plug-in will do. Hope it helps
thanks Michael! your help is much appreciated; will try now
I checked your site and I think you’ve done it. Congratulations !! BTW, you may want to resize your photos a bit, those are little too big …
heh yup, resized to 720 just like your blog entry
which is how I first found your site
Thank you SOOOOO much. I take pictures at my school with a Canon EOS Rebel T2i just for fun and they are great photos, but they are also 7-10MP sized pics and they would post somewhat blurry. Resizing them is a hassle since i take about 300-400 on average. Then I found the script in Photoshop to automatically resize them for me. (File -> Scripts -> Image Processor) From there you can just type the size you want to resize them to. I used your magic number and GREAT SUCCESS! *Borat Voice* Thank you thank you thank you. it used to take 4-8 hours to upload all those pictures but now it takes 30 mins max
Hi Richard, glad you found it useful. Enjoy.
Hi
Thanks for sharing how about the resolution
Hi George, glad that you found it useful. Enjoy your Facebook album.
Hey Mike, I already adjusted my pix to 720 (300dpi). But when I upload it on facebook, it lost the quality. Any advise how to get the original picture quality when uploading on facebook? Thanks. =:->
Hi Tracer,
After your resizing of the pix, you may want to apply some sharpening first, before uploading to Facebook …
Hope it helps.
Hi Mike,
Would you give me more details on sharpening my pix? I’m a novice on photoshop and tried sharpening 1 of my pix but got same result after uploading on facebook. Thanks again..
Hi Tracer, forget about Photoshop … it’s too complicated if you all need is just to do some sharpening … try some simple (and free) imaging tools like Faststone. Hope it helps.
I’ve been re-sizing to 720 pixels and sharpening, but I’m convinced that the Facebook processing is lowering the JPEG quality-setting. They just don’t seem to want to give their users a good photographic experience.
Hi Trevor,
Yes, very likely FB will do another round of processing to meet their size limit. Therefore, I suggest you to also adjust the JPEG compression ratio lower to make file size smaller first (as long as you can accept the quality).
Hope it helps.
Georgious images. What kit did you use to take these?
Olympus E-510 with 11-22.
Here is my question, I can resize as you suggested and have photoshop no problem. But my images don’t fit their frame. So, lets say you click on album and select an album. The album opens to partial images. To see a whole image, you have to click on that image. I there a way of making it so that the image fully shows in the frame of the album page? The cutoff images…so so looking.
Then when you click you see the picture and information about it
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