I have learned of a dirty little secret…Facebook compressed my photos…A LOT!
Do you remember when Facebook first came out? I sure do. I thought it was so nice to stay connected with friends and family. But more than that, I loved the ability to share photos. As someone who treasures photos of family and friends the ability to share so easily was like a miracle.
I soon set to work creating albums in Facebook to have everything organized. At that time in my life, I was beginning to struggle with digital photo overload. This seemed like such a great solution. My photos were organized and at my fingertips. Like many, I shared photos snapped with my phone while on the go, but I wasn’t diligent about backing up these photos elsewhere. Sadly many only are available on Facebook.
Why is that so bad? Well, for starters they aren’t that easy to find. Facebook keeps changing and navigating to find my photos gets harder and harder. But worst of all is that Facebook compresses photos A LOT! I never really understood how much until recently.
Like many Mum’s, I like to post those first day of school photos. It’s tradition. Even though my children are teenagers, I still take the first day of school off of work so I can snap this traditional photo. I take the photo with my DSLR, then go to my computer and upload to Facebook. I also upload my photos into a School Album in FOREVER for safe keeping (no compression here!).
Later that evening, while I was scrolling through Facebook, I saw comments on my FB post and decided I should also post the photo on Instagram (I don’t use Instagram as often as FB). Since I already had the photo in front of me on Facebook, I quickly downloaded it, then uploaded to Instagram. Quick, easy and done.
A couple days later I was cleaning photos off my phone, so I was going to delete the photo I downloaded from Facebook since I had the original safely in my FOREVER account, when curiosity struck. I wonder…how much does Facebook compress my photo? So instead, I uploaded that photo (the one I downloaded from Facebook) to my Forever Account. Then I clicked on each photo to view the photo properties.
My original photo was 5.54 MB and it shocked me to see that the one I downloaded from Facebook was only 125 kB!
That’s a HUGE difference and it would be VERY noticeable if I ever wanted to print my photo.
Lesson learned, Facebook is NOT a place to store original photos. It is fun to share, but please, please, please, save your full-resolution photos elsewhere.
Do you have photos only found on Facebook?
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