Ivan Makarov Blog

I do not upload any photos to Facebook, with the exception of an occasional profile shot and here is why. I always found extremely irritating and disappointing how their server and their resizing algorithm handles photos. Over 30 million photos get uploaded to Facebook daily, and yet not a lot of people notice the substantial decrease in quality of photos as they get resized to be displayed on the web-site. Perhaps majority of Facebook users don’t care, but I always found it strange that some photographers I know still upload their photos on Facebook, despite how Facebook degrades these photos in the process.

Let me illustrate this with a couple of examples.

I find it hard to ignore the obvious degradation in quality when I compare Facebook with Flickr versions of the same jpeg file. When uploaded to Facebook, images tend to lose contrast, change color, and most importantly, they lose sharpness. What I’m seeing is a different photograph that is not rendered in the way I intended it to be rendered.

While I acknowledge that Facebook’s prime goal is not to display photography, I still do not fully understand why they take their photo rendering code for granted, especially in today’s world where everyone owns a digital camera.

My solution is not to upload any photos to Facebook, and continue to host my photography on Flickr. Their resizing algorithms aren’t perfect either, but I find it satisfactory most of the time, and contrast, color and sharpness is preserved.