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Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

> And they probably always will be.

Famous last words when predicting non-advance of technology.

Yup, you're right. I'm lacking imagination.

Please help me understand a future where social networking sites will maintain and display ~ 6200px X 6200px photos of your selfies. Outside of genetically engineering new eyeballs, I'm struggling here.

I was at an Apple store yesterday, just behind a teen who was puzzled why her phone was out of storage space. Turned out she had 9 gigabytes of texts stored - dominated by full-resolution pictures. So yeah, as we're moving into 10-40 GP imagers on phones, people are casually and regularly sending around enough data to start including a lot more visual information than they expect. Social media sites may take a while to catch up, but "texting" is already hitting that resolution.

FB doesn't need to upgrade to extra high-resolution in the news feeds -- a waste of bandwidth and time. They just need to make original uploads available via the API.

I think it's safe to assume that FB has tried to keep the original version of every photo ever uploaded. A few years ago, YouTube retroactively upgraded uploaded videos to HD. It's also safe to assume that they're going to continue upgrading/evolving/extending their most important feature, photos, and try to make it the #1 place to organize, store, and share all your photos.

Facebook then becomes an API upgrade away from exposing the original versions of uploaded photos. The photos will also come with all of your friend's faces conveniently tagged, allowing an app with the right permissions to extract high resolution faces/pupils/reflections. None of this needs to happen in the news stream.

I'm not sure, but I think FB mobile does some sort of downgrade before the photo is uploaded to the server. I've had pictures upload to Facebook from my phone in a very short period of time, shorter than would be required for a full res upload.

So they may not have full resolution versions from the mobile, which is likely their primary source of pictures.

Yes, I think this is correct. They're still prioritizing performance first right now. But when the time is right, they'll probably upgrade that capability as well. Either pushing the full resolution file up, or syncing the full resolution later when you're on wifi.

For a while, the Java upload tool was knocking down resolution before upload on desktop, too. That was a few years ago, I think. 2008-09?

Ubiquitous fiber networks and a single order of magnitude increase in the capacity of storage media would make it "free." As for why: bigger is better?

I'm not saying you're wrong. But look at it this way: you are predicting that the resolution of stored photos won't increase by another power of ten. If you are right, this would be the first time in tech history that such a prediction would be correct.

While I am skeptical that every technology progresses in lockstep and indefinitely: storage capacity; storage speeds; network speeds; consumer devices; I'm actually objecting more to "bigger is better." It seems that isn't necessarily true. Especially when it's a photo of your face.

Also, just a nitpick. I think relevant factor is ~100, the difference between the current resolution maintained by most websites and the proposed one for this technique to start becoming feasible.

[Ok, 20 may be right. I didn't know they allowed 2000x1000]

Facebook will store 2000x1???, and the technique proposed here requires 6000x6???. That's a factor of about 20, not 100.

Personally, I will enjoy seeing high res pictures of other people on my 4k monitor when I get one.

Again, not saying I'm 100% that you're wrong, but you're making a bold and unprecedented prediction.

Wasn't all that long ago that 320x200 images were considered astoundingly good and sufficient. The "zoom image" scene in Blade Runner was wishful thinking; now we're discussing its imminent reality.

It also wasn't long ago that we thought we would have flying cars and supersonic airliners. Physics is a cruel master.

I thought this was a discussion about Facebook serving higher resolution digital photos - why is physics relevant here?

I think the point is, if smartphone cameras eventually get to say 40MP then people will start uploading at that resolution even if there's absolutely no benefit from it. The image may then be scaled down to be shown on the page, but FB can keep the original.

it would be cool to make group pictures, though.

Isn't one of Nokia/Microsoft's phones, currently on market, at 42 megapixels?

It is; and the PureView 808 (Symbian) has had that before. But even though the full-resolution shot is saved for post-processing you usually get a 5- or 8MP shot that's your actual final image.

Just a few days ago, somebody posted a link on HN for a 4K 24" monitor. Right now, I'm typing on a computer hooked up to two monitors with 2560x1440 resolution.

10 years ago, I never would've guessed we'd be up to 120" TVs with 4k resolution. I was pretty happy with my 42", which was a big step up from what my parents had used before.

Right now, those examples I mentioned are new and expensive, but it won't be another 10 years before they come down in price and Sony and Samsung will be looking to sell us on another resolution.

Meanwhile, having computers hooked up to your TV is also becoming increasingly popular. My dad hates looking at a tiny computer screen, and would much rather look at photos on a TV.

So you've got high resolution TVs, and low resolution photos. That means the photos are too small or blown up to show their pixelation. That won't fly forever.

As a hobbyist photographer, I can tell you the problem with this will be optics. The discussion here (and the article itself) seems to act as if sensor pixel density is the primary limiting factor on resolution at this point - and it's not. [1] is an article that has a good and through discussion on sensors out-resolving lenses.

So, your limiting factor is glass, and manufacturing precision on that end is moving forward much slower than on the sensor.

[1] - http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/resolution.shtml

> it won't be another 10 years before they come down in price

I wager we'll see 4k tablets under $1k within 2 years, and TVs will have to follow suit (drop in price, increase in quality).

Did you ever click on a photo in facebook and wish you could zoom in and see a larger size (or even the original) in order to see more detail of a specific part? I sure have. The future where they maintain huge images is the future where enough people want to be able to do that and the cost of supporting it is small enough. It really isn't too hard to imagine.

You're also assuming field of view (FOV) stays the same - which it won't. Think about if every picture you took was a panorama - I don't think 18000px x 2135px (to keep the same number of pixels) is unreasonable resolution for a 180° panorama.

Now imagine that lenses for single-shot panoramas are standard on all cameras and cellphones.

haha, yes, your lack of imagination in this regard is tempting to jump all over, but I point you at exhibit A, the past.

I used to think my 50GB disk was massive. Now I have more RAM than that, and use it all!

Photos will increase in size because of many factors, possibly including multiple focus points, or more color information, or 3d or a whole suite of yet to be thought up reasons.

I am very sure social networking sites will store larger files than 6.2k x 6.2k, with the 4K monitors and video and cameras producing larger and larger images (think medium format, even a piddly little smartphone now has 49MP!)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/95342015/360o-for-gopro-...

This saves a big resolution picture with spacial info. With your computer then you see a smaller part of the image. 6200x6200 images is not too much.

Add everything that has to do with 3D. Life is 3D, not 2D.

Higher DPI displays for life-size photos?

Okay I'll do the math, if we look at a chart we can find that most human heads fit within the measurements of 6.5 inches wide, and 9.4 inches tall [1]. That fits nicely within the 8x10 inch standard size for photographs that is common, so assuming we display these images at the maximum resolution human eyes can discern [2](somewhere <300 pixels per square inch) that means that in order for you to display a human head life-sized at 'visually flawless' resolution only requires an image with a resolution of 2400x3000 pixels.

I can see the appeal of life-sized photos on social networking sites in the future. Group photos could benefit from being larger than that to include multiple people at life-size, but I'm unsure of how a resolution greater than 2400x3000 would be useful for a profile picture at this point.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/HeadAnthr...

[2] http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina...

Two heads side by side on a 30" 300 dpi monitor should be enough to drive need for this tech, then.

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