Facebook photos now 2048 pix wide | Hacker News Reader

Facebook photos now 2048 pix wide

blog.facebook.com

22 pointsjkaljundi14 comments

This is much better, but 2048 pixels is still significantly smaller than modern high-quality digital cameras produce. It would be better if they weren't scaled down at all.

They also don't mention what happened to previously uploaded photography. Presumably there's no way to get the high-quality originals upscaled now and users have to re-upload them.

Running some local photo sharing sites in Europe myself, with tens of millions of photos, I would say people rarely open the originals or anything larger than 2048. Originals make sense only for historic archiving and paper prints. 99% of users never look at anything larger than what fits on their screen.

Most photo sites keep the originals for future upscaling though, I would assume Facebook has done this as well? Storage is cheap. Even Youtube I believe has kept all the originals uploaded, even when they offered crappy low-res videos on the site. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It's smaller than the resolution high-quality DSLRs can reliably produce, but I think it probably does cover the vast majority of Facebook users' uploads. A 2048x1536 photo is still 3 megapixels, which isn't bad. Sure, 10-megapixel point and shoots are common, but most don't really reliably capture 10 megapixels worth of information, and might even benefit from being downsampled to 3 megapixels (if the downsampling algorithm is high quality, anyway).

What about the poor people looking at the images?

That is awesome. So many people have moved exclusively to Facebook for photos (because really it's only your friends who care), and better quality is always good.

Plus it makes the "print your Facebook photos" feature a lot less stupid.

Great to see some of the results of the divvyshot acquisition finally coming to fruition.

Yeah, notice that the blog post was written by Sam Odio!

Back in summer, many of the Facebook photos face tagging features came from Divvyshot if I remember correctly.

The most important question for me is have they improved the compression and resizing quality at all? Historically Facebook's treatment of uploaded images has severely degraded them, often to the point where an originally sharp image looks blurry.

this is a great idea. In my mind their pictures and galleries is really what was one of the first big breaks for Facebook.

I'm not a Flickr user, but was wondering what does it offer that Facebook doesn't?

Geotagging. EXIF info. Creative Commons licensing options. Traffic stats. Slidshows. Downloads of the original file.

Exactly. Wish that there is an option for users to keep EXIF including geotagging. And give us API to query metadata of pictures (with privacy control).

Public by default? Although Facebook is trying really hard to do away with private by default.

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