

Facebook photos now 2048 pix wide - jkaljundi
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=432670242130

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avar
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.

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jkaljundi
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.

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smackfu
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.

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

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

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rbritton
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.

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

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

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

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johannchiang
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).

