The photos or videos you upload may look blurry once they’re posted and they don’t retain the original high quality. There are a few ways to upload high-quality photos to Facebook.
Why Your Photos Aren’t Already High Quality
The reason your photos aren’t currently of high quality when you post them currently and is either the aspect ratio is incorrect so Facebook will compress your image. Or your file is over 30MB which means that it will be compressed. To make sure that your Facebook photos are of high quality, you need to have the correct aspect ratio or you need to be uploading a picture that’s below 30MB. All photos are constrained within 1080 pixels (px) so this results in compression especially when your original photo size is 4000 x 3000px. If you’re outside this limit, Facebook won’t keep your photos as high quality as they could be. If you’re just hitting Facebook’s limits in terms of their dimensions, then Facebook won’t penalize your pictures and videos because they don’t need to compress them and lower the quality of it. There’s no way to change the upload quality of your photos on Facebook, it all depends on the quality of your camera. Here are 6 ways to upload higher quality photos on Facebook which will still stay within the limitation of 1080px and make your picture look as best as it can be.
1. Your Picture isn’t Optimized
A blurry picture is the result of poor optimization, a side effect of Facebook most likely stretching the original image you uploaded. If you upload an image that’s too small, or low resolution, Facebook will then stretch the image to fit your profile window. To fix this problem, upload an image that’s of higher quality. You should certainly aim for Facebook’s limit of 30 MB for an image. The reason being is that a higher quality image doesn’t suffer from stretching, and shrinking a higher resolution photo isn’t going to cause blurry pixelation.
2. Your Network Connection Timed Out
Not an uncommon problem, per say, but certainly a unique issue. You see, when you upload an image, it doesn’t upload all of the data at one time–it does so a little at a time. The strength of your connection helps churn the data faster. If your network times out while you’re still uploading, well, you could end up with a blurry image. You need to make sure that you have a strong internet connection when uploading to Facebook. The best solution for this is to check your network status. You may have to reboot your equipment, like your modem and router, and simply try again, like so:
3. Your Image isn’t Supported
Facebook doesn’t support a lot of different formats. As of the writing of this article, Facebook only supports JPEG, GIF, and PNG file formats. If you anything but, then switch over to a different file format. If a file is not supported, then Facebook won’t be able to optimize the image which might leave you with a blurry picture. Sticking to their supported formats will maximize your chances of your image not being compressed.
4. Reducing Compression in JPEG Files
Since Facebook will always have to do some sort of compression on your image, you’ll have to live with the fact that there’s nothing you can do about that. However, there are ways to reduce the amount of compression they do so you don’t have to experience the full effects of the quality loss. When it comes to minimizing the amount of compression that’s occurring, one key thing to take into consideration is the dimension of the photo. The dimension is crucial to how your picture comes out when you upload it to Facebook. If you’re able to do this, make sure the photo you want to upload is 2048px on its longest side. This will minimize the amount of compression that’ll take place. This is because Facebook won’t change the dimensions of your image therefore it remains as sharp as possible. If you haven’t got a file that’s this large, then make sure that the photo is at least 960px on the longest side. If you’re using editing software, make sure that the picture is sharp enough when looking at it with 100% view. Doing this will ensure that it stays sharp before you upload it. If things aren’t looking too sharp, then you can sharpen it up using Adobe Photoshop. Another great feature to use before you upload something to Facebook is the Save for Web function. Compress the image to a JPEG file at 70% quality, whilst ensuring it’s at a sRGB color profile.
How to Upload High Quality Photos to Facebook
1. Upload HD
There’s an upload HD settings that allows you to make sure that your pictures and videos are uploaded as HD. When it comes to the size of your image, no one really clicks it to view it at full size so the width is really all you need to care about and since people are on their phone when using Facebook, you’ll only need to consider the width of the timeline that they’re viewing it one. The current supported sizes for normal images are: • 720px • 960px • 2048px When it comes to making sure your images look the best, you need to make sure that you try and keep things at 2048px as this yeilds the best results. But if you take side by side images of 2048 px, and compare them with images with a 960px width, you’ll only notice then you’ll notice that they’re only marginally better. If you have images that have a width of 1080px, then you should know that the widths of 2048px and 960px look better side by side. But it’s very marginal between 960px and 1080px. But you should keep in mind that 2048px is the best width when it comes to your images and it’s a cut above the rest. By saying this, you can’t be worried about if the image will be stolen because it most likely will. But if you can’t size like this, you should know that the next best-supporting sizes are 960px and 720px. Making sure that you avoid non-standard sizes will be crucial to how your images come out. For Android:
- Tap on the Hamburger button.
- Select Settings and Privacy
- Go to the Settings tab.
- Tap on the Media and Contacts option.
- Toggle Upload photos in HD on. For iOS:
- Tap on the Hamburger button.
- Select Settings and Privacy
- Go to the Settings tab.
- Tap on the Media and Contacts option.
- Select Video and Pictures.
- Select Optimized
2. Keeping the Right Aspect Ratio so Facebook Keeps Your Photos High Quality
You need to keep an aspect ratio of 4:5 so that Facebook keeps the quality of your photo. This will make the ideal photo size 1080px by 1350px. This means that your photo will fill up the screen so it will keep the quality of the picture high. If you want to post a square picture, then you need to keep an aspect ratio of 1:1. This means that the photo size will be 1080px by 1080px. To do this with any photo you have, it’s best you use Adobe Lightroom because this already has a setting that will keep your picture at an aspect ratio of 4:5. If you want an aspect ratio of 1:1, then simply using your phone’s setting to crop will allow you to do this. 2. When choosing the aspect ratio, keep it at 4:5 or 8:10. 3. When exporting the photo, check Resize to Fit. 4. 1080px with a resolution of 72ppi. 5. Select Sharpen for Screen. 6. Select Export.
4. Maximize Your Phones Camera Settings to Make Your Photos HD
The best way to upload high-quality photos on Facebook is to maximize your phone’s camera quality. Doing this means that you’ll have better quality photos so when you upload them to Facebook. Another huge problem is that most of the apps and software that people use when on the internet are not color-managed. Browsers are a huge culprit and much of them fail to manage color. If you want to see an example of this, drag your jpeg image into Firefox browser window and see how much better it looks there compared to a browser like Chrome. This is because Firefox is colour managed browser whereas most other browsers aren’t. If you want to make sure that apps like Facebook display your images as best as possible, you need to export your image from lightroom or photoshop and make sure the color profile has been converted to the internet standard sRGB. This will make sure that sRBG allows you to cater to those who are using their phone and it also allows wide displays like your laptop and PC to display the image properly because it knows it’s in sRBG – if this isn’t the case, then the picture won’t display properly and it’ll be over-saturated. Phones like your iPhone and Android don’t recognize embedded ICC profiles so images using color spaces that aren’t favored tend to appear slightly under-saturated on these devices. To fix this problem, converting to sRGB when exporting means that they will interpret and display the image correctly even enough they don’t recognize sRGB.
When you adjust the settings and max it out, Facebook will reduce the size of an image to fit its maximum rules. The maximum size of Facebook posts are 1080px so if you take images from the default camera, utilizing the best resolution will let you keep within the maximum size of posts.
5. Use a High Quality to Keep Quality High
Another thing you can do to keep the quality of your pictures high is to use a high-quality camera. This could either be a DSL camera that you’re using and this will allow you to keep the quality high straight away. Another great alternative is a new iPhone or Android. These devices have very advanced cameras and this will allow you to keep your picture quality high. When you do upload the picture, rather than Facebook compressing it and making it blurry, the picture will lose quality but it will still be of great quality compared to other people’s posts that don’t use high-quality cameras.
6. Use Facebook’s Camera to Prevent Upload HD Photos
If you’re using another Camera app, maybe you can consider using Facebook’s default camera app. Although there isn’t much you can do with the default camera of Facebook, it takes pretty decent photos that are high-res. This follows the previous method’s technique in taking a high-resolution photo and the post will just be adjusted upon upload to the platform. The best thing about this is that you’ll see how they’re going to turn on as soon as you take the photo as opposed to when you upload them and feel the huge drop in quality.
7. Add Extra Brightness & A Little Saturation
Since Facebook has a white background, this can affect the brightness of the image and it can make it look darker against the white background. Adding a little bit of saturation and brightness to your image before you upload it will fix this problem. If you’ve noticed most photography sites, the background is always black because it helps the image appear brighter and perfectly saturated.
8. Don’t Share the Photo Before Uploading
If you’re exchanging photos through Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, there’s a hundred percent chance that the media content gets compressed. Facebook and WhatsApp do this in order to keep the experience smooth and sacrifices some of the content quality of the photos and videos. I know I’m guilty of this because I always send photos through WhatsApp so I didn’t realize that the media gets compressed until I dug into the file directory. Sharing on apps before you post on Facebook will cause initial compression so when you do go to Facebook and post the already compressed photo, then it could come out pixelated due to Facebook’s further compression. Alternatives to this can be sharing the file through Bluetooth, or uploading it via Google Drive or iCloud.
9. Update your Facebook App
One thing that could stop your photo quality from being high on Facebook is if the app version you’re using is outdated. Consider going to Google Play or iTunes App Store and downloading the latest version of Facebook. The app updates from time to time so you can check back to the app page of Facebook for the latest version. You can also consider updating your device if you’re using an older unit. Older units have an older version of Android or iOS which may not have the capabilities needed to run a more recent version of the Facebook app.
10. PNG Conversion
A while back, you could upload PNGs to Facebook without any problems, they wouldn’t be compressed because of their lossless format, but now Facebook has started to convert PNGs to JPEGs on upload to prevent the upload or take up of memory which means that you’ll experience compression. One trick that many have found to work is the process of exporting as a PNG since there’s only one stage of compression that occurs with Facebook when compressing. It’s only one step because if you export the images to your device as a JPEG format, that’s already when step from RAW to JPB, then Facebook will compress it again. Although the difference is pretty much undetectable as tests compressing JPG to JPG then PNG to JPG is almost undetectable but it’s worth the try. If anything it’ll be a downside because it’ll take up space on your device.
11. Use Other Photo editing Apps With Pre-Sets to Keep Quality High
There are many other third-party apps and programs that you can use for your perfect Facebook post. If you’ve seen the vivid and beautiful images by many of today’s Facebook influencers, then you can bet a few of them would have used a third party app or program. If you’re on your phone or a desktop, you can use Canva. They already considered Facebook’s pre-set structures and framework so their templates are very good in quality. I use this whenever I need a quick edit because the templates are ready to go. Canva really compliments Facebook and other apps that allow you to post images and content. Canva has a mobile app that lets you do the editing on your phone so you don’t need to change screens or access your laptop or desktop.
12. Differences Between Timeline, Groups & Pages
You may be wondering if there’s more compression done depending on if you post the picture to a group, page or photo albums. This has been tested by willgoodlet.com and he found that there was no difference and each image was treated identically. He pixel peeped all the images on the 3 different places and there was no difference between them whatsoever so it’s not something you should worry about.
13. Crop Ratios
Trying to decide the correct size for posting on platforms like Facebook is difficult because the sizing is always changing but a major trend recently has shown that things are gearing towards mobile devices therefore verticle pictures are the way forward. Before verticle images were shrunk into tiny pics but now the Facebook app is used a lot more than the desktop version, verticle is defo the best way to be sizing your pictures. Other sites do prompt verticle images and it’s the most common way images are viewed on mobile because of the way they’re desired. More real estate is allowed for verticle images which are why sites like Instagram have given the option to upload pictures that aren’t any longer square.
