Facebook Takes on Flickr with High-Res Image Sharing
Facebook has held little sway for photography enthusiasts, mainly because it compresses images so much that quality is sacrificed. Now it looks like the social giant wants to go up against photo sharing sites with a new high-resolution image sharing feature.
Facebook is rolling out sweeping changes in the next few weeks that change how images are processed and displayed on the site.
"We're increasing the size of the photos stored from 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest edge, for an 8 times increase overall," said Sam Odio, product manager for Facebook Photos, on the company blog.
The changes can be boiled down to three things: much higher resolution for images , better photo and slideshow viewing environments and a simpler image uploading process.
The photo viewer now has better navigation features that allow users to see whole albums without switching pages or reloading images. Images will load faster and they are presented on a dark background to provide better contrast and viewing quality.
Finally, Facebook made it possible to tag multiple photos at once while uploading and has promised the whole uploading process is now more reliable.
These changes fix many of the problems that people had with the site and better positions Facebook to compete with social networks focused around images, such as Flickr.
