Facebook image compression

workaccount

Hi,
I've spent nearly the whole day working on images trying to get them to display properly in facebook. I knew the facebook site was doing something to them and after some more googling it seems that facebook do compress your images.

The great thing about facebook was being able to share out the images you take with people that are in them and others socially connected to you that may be interested.

Is there anyway to get around this? I'm not going to upload them otherwise as facebook is ruining them. I might just have to start linking to my pix account or something which is'nt really ideal.

Thanks.

melekalikimaka

yes they compress them, they compress them using a java based program, does it before they go up to decrease upload sizes, no way round it i thinks... sure facebook... i wouldnt be putting up photos there after the rights crap of last month anyway

Valentia

Yeah, don't bother with it. It screws them up and FB is not the best place to show your pics. Open a pix.ie account and link there from FB.

workaccount

I'm just after uploading two test images to pix.ie (only opened my pix account recently) and they seem to be have been compressed also.

They are alot softer once uploaded!?

Mr. Grieves

Yeah the compression is horrible. I found an app called MyWebEmbed which lets you embed an image from Flickr or elsewhere, but it doesn't work great - there's no way of putting the embedded link onto your profile page. Until they fix this or reduce the compression I'd say post one or two pics, with links to more on Flickr/Pixie.

workaccount

Mr. Grieves wrote: »

Yeah the compression is horrible. I found an app called MyWebEmbed which lets you embed an image from Flickr or elsewhere, but it doesn't work great - there's no way of putting the embedded link onto your profile page. Until they fix this or reduce the compression I'd say post one or two pics, with links to more on Flickr/Pixie.

Good idea about posting an image or two to entice!

Valentia

workaccount wrote: »

I'm just after uploading two test images to pix.ie (only opened my pix account recently) and they seem to be have been compressed also.

They are alot softer once uploaded!?

Hmm. Can't say I have that problem. Marcus put a lot of work into getting the algorithms right for sharpness at different sizes. I think Pix does an excellent job TBH. Do you sharpen before you upload? What's your workflow?

workaccount

Valentia wrote: »

Hmm. Can't say I have that problem. Marcus put a lot of work into getting the algorithms right for sharpness at different sizes. I think Pix does an excellent job TBH. Do you sharpen before you upload? What's your workflow?

Bring the TIFF into PS after RAW edits in ZoomBrowser. Then change DPI to 72 and size to whatever. Then I usually use a sharpen filter as alot of my shots are not usually perfectly focused due to beginner issues I think (possibly that my el cheapo 50mm 1.8 is causing the focusing issues though as there mostly low light and I know the AF isn't meant to be the best).

Then once I have some small edits like contrast, brightness and levels done I save them out as a maximum quality JPEG. If I look at the JPEG then in PS it's perfect but once I upload to pix.ie then it's lost alot of it's sharpness!

.Longshanks.

As others have mentioned you can link your flickr account to facebook. When i upload a pic to flickr my facebook profile page updates automatically with a tiny thumbnail. This is linked directly to flickr...

Valentia

workaccount wrote: »

Bring the TIFF into PS after RAW edits in ZoomBrowser. Then change DPI to 72 and size to whatever. Then I usually use a sharpen filter as alot of my shots are not usually perfectly focused due to beginner issues I think (possibly that my el cheapo 50mm 1.8 is causing the focusing issues though as there mostly low light and I know the AF isn't meant to be the best).

Then once I have some small edits like contrast, brightness and levels done I save them out as a maximum quality JPEG. If I look at the JPEG then in PS it's perfect but once I upload to pix.ie then it's lost alot of it's sharpness!

Mention it on the Pixie thread and Marcus will have a look for you.

Marcus

Valentia wrote: »

Mention it on the Pixie thread and Marcus will have a look for you.

I'm here - Wassup ?

workaccount wrote: »

Bring the TIFF into PS after RAW edits in ZoomBrowser. Then change DPI to 72 and size to whatever. Then I usually use a sharpen filter as alot of my shots are not usually perfectly focused due to beginner issues I think (possibly that my el cheapo 50mm 1.8 is causing the focusing issues though as there mostly low light and I know the AF isn't meant to be the best).

Then once I have some small edits like contrast, brightness and levels done I save them out as a maximum quality JPEG. If I look at the JPEG then in PS it's perfect but once I upload to pix.ie then it's lost alot of it's sharpness!

Photo sharing sites will always compress your images to some degree, but there exists a happy medium between quality and cost. (You have no idea how much bandwidth we consume as we are currently serving >50 million images a month from our image servers). Serving uncompressed images would x10 our costs.

Even with compression, the image should not however be "softer". If may contain compression artifacts on certain portions of the image, especially around high contrast angular sections, like text or straight edges. This is just a side effect of the jpg compression algorithm but for the most part should not be that noticeable...

I won't even comment on Facebook and their treatment of photos. :pac:

What's your Pixie account? and a link to the photo would be helpful too.

Marcus

workaccount

Thanks for your reply Marcus.

Here is the image on my pix.ie account.



Attached to this post is the original jpeg as created here on my computer.

Marcus

workaccount wrote: »

Thanks for your reply Marcus.

Here is the image on my pix.ie account.



Attached to this post is the original jpeg as created here on my computer.

Thanks for posting the photos.

The reason the pixie version is soft is because you uploaded an already resized version (622px x 414px) to Pixie in the first place and our resizing algorithms didn't have much to go on. The version you posted here is 830px × 554px which contains a lot more information.

Also, when resizing images the larger the distance between the original and the the final size, the sharper the final size will be. For instance if you resize an image from 550px to 500px, the result will be much softer than if you resized the original image 2400px to 500px.

Can I ask you to upload the full size image (the original >2000px version) to Pixie and post the resulting 500px photo here to show you the difference.

Marcus

workaccount

I'd say that looks better now. I'll just try it with another photo.

Marcus

Doooh... I had a big long thread showing you all the variations that you uploaded side by side to illustrate the difference in sharpness based on upload size, but then you went and deleted all the photos including the one referenced above... :rolleyes:

In short, I'm happy with the quality of the resized version you posted above.

workaccount

iampixie wrote: »

Doooh... I had a big long thread showing you all the variations that you uploaded side by side to illustrate the difference in sharpness based on upload size, but then you went and deleted all the photos including the one referenced above... :rolleyes:

In short, I'm happy with the quality of the resized version you posted above.

Damn sorry. I would have been very interested in your post. On the chance that you have not deleted it I have just uploaded two small images up there again.

Sorry!

Marcus

workaccount wrote: »

Damn sorry. I would have been very interested in your post. On the chance that you have not deleted it I have just uploaded two small images up there again.

Sorry!

It was deleted... but since you uploaded them again:

Original uploaded and resized by Pixie to 500px:


830px version uploaded and resized by Pixie to 500px:


..and just for completeness this is what Facebook did to your photo:


You can clearly see that the top version is sharper (look at lines on T-Shirt on guy top right), better contrast and looks better because you gave us more information (a larger file) to work with.

workaccount

Thanks for that. Is it possible to limit my viewers to one possible resolution? I don't want anybody to be able to open a larger version than the size you have quoted there in your post.

Marcus

workaccount wrote: »

Thanks for that. Is it possible to limit my viewers to one possible resolution? I don't want anybody to be able to open a larger version than the size you have quoted there in your post.

Not at the moment.

The best option is for you to resize your photos to 500px and upload them at that resolution. Pixie will not resize a 500px photo as it is already the correct size.

Hope this helps!

Calina

Marcus, the drums grow every louder on that front I think.... :-)

Marcus

Calina wrote: »

Marcus, the drums grow every louder on that front I think.... :-)

Yes I hear them in my sleep !

workaccount

iampixie wrote: »

Not at the moment.

The best option is for you to resize your photos to 500px and upload them at that resolution. Pixie will not resize a 500px photo as it is already the correct size.

Hope this helps!

So that's 500px in width and what do I need to set the height to then?

I've just checked and the image quoted in the above post is 556px x 368px!?

Marcus

workaccount wrote: »

So that's 500px in width and what do I need to set the height to then?

I've just checked and the image quoted in the above post is 556px x 368px!?

It's 500px on the longest side... either height or width depending on orientation.

The above image is actually 500px × 332px , not sure where you got your dimensions from

workaccount

Just created a image size of 500x332 and resized my JPEG into it. Then uploaded and pix is making it bigger than it looks in PS thus it's abit soft again.

Marcus

workaccount wrote: »

Just created a image size of 500x332 and resized my JPEG into it. Then uploaded and pix is making it bigger than it looks in PS thus it's abit soft again.

Not sure what you mean... but this image has been correct sized prior to upload so that Pixie will show the original image and not attempt to resize it.

Ricky91t

workaccount wrote: »

Just created a image size of 500x332 and resized my JPEG into it. Then uploaded and pix is making it bigger than it looks in PS thus it's abit soft again.

Maybe you've got your browser set to zoom into things?

workaccount

Ricky91t wrote: »

Maybe you've got your browser set to zoom into things?

That's it I think yeah.

Mycroft H

Ricky91t wrote: »

Maybe you've got your browser set to zoom into things?

wouldnt that zoom everything though?

Op what screen res are you working at? Sub 1024x768?

workaccount

1920x1200.

It was zooming the images - don't know why I didn't notice on the first one tbh.

workaccount

Hi Marcus,
Just have a question for you here.

How do the view stats for your photos work? Is it by IP address?

ie. I have got so many views on my photos and I would like to know if they are all unique. I know in our house multiple people were looking at them and I think they added up the view counts. However if I looked at them multiple times I don't think it was counting up more. We were all using the same IP address though.

Hope I've explained myself properly above.

Marcus

workaccount wrote: »

Hi Marcus,
Just have a question for you here.

How do the view stats for your photos work? Is it by IP address?

ie. I have got so many views on my photos and I would like to know if they are all unique. I know in our house multiple people were looking at them and I think they added up the view counts. However if I looked at them multiple times I don't think it was counting up more. We were all using the same IP address though.

Hope I've explained myself properly above.

Views are unique per session. If you view the photo every day for a week, that would make 7 views, but if you refresh the page 7 times, that would make 1 view. We use cookies, authentication and IP addresses to ensure uniqueness.