Facebook image quality

[jseyfert3]

Probably not a shocker, but I was posting my truck for sale and editing some details on both Craigslist and Facebook. I realized the photos on Facebook looked not great in fullscreen, compared to how I remembered them. I pulled up the Craigslist and Facebook ads side-by-side and the quality difference in the photos is amazing. May need to zoom in to see it.


This is a screenshot from my dual monitor setup, and although the monitor on the right (Facebook) is lower resolution than the one on the left, that isn't what caused the softness. Granted, Facebook has good reason to reduce the quality of their images to the very edge of where the average person would notice, given most of their user base is on mobile and most Facebook pictures are just viewed briefly then never again. But you'd think maybe they'd not compress ad pictures as much, since these don't have to be stored forever and people may want to look at the details of something they want to buy.

Then again, maybe since my bumper needs to be cleaned and there's a couple small scratches over the front right wheel from a botched job backing into a tight garage it's better for the images to not be insanely detailed.

 

[jseyfert3]

Of course the forum resized the screenshot, making the difference less noticeable.

Even Craigslist to the original is noticeable, though that's understandable given the original is an 11 MB, 26 MP image shot from a Canon RP full-frame mirrorless camera. Nobody wants to host huge images for free, though it seems like it wouldn't be a huge strain to host slightly higher quality images on sale sites were you can delete the images after a short period.

Details of photos:

• Original: 6240x4160, 10.6 MB
• Edited image with license plate blocked out: 6240x4160, 9.25 MB (itself resized with a loss of quality I probably couldn't notice myself)
• Craigslist downloaded image: 1200x800, 176 KB
• Facebook downloaded image: 940x640, 144 KB

If you're curious, I've put the slightly edited original and the downloaded craigslist and Facebook photos into a Google Photos album. These were uploaded with original quality selected, so they weren't resized. Truck Image Quality Comparison

Order is original (edited), Facebook, Craigslist. At least when I tested this by opening that link while signed out of Google, the original (edited) image doesn't appear as sharp as it should. But zoom in. The detail is there. The Facebook and Craigslist ones cannot be zoomed in. However this latter part is perhaps why the Craigslist one is better. Besides being 60% larger by number of pixels, Craigslist resized it to a size that fits decent on most desktop displays without further resizing. So what's left is viewed at 100% (pixel to pixel match) on a lot of computer displays. Whereas Facebook threw away most of the pixels, then goes and displays it to fit your monitor, showing at larger than 100% be Darn.

Why does the truck not view quick as crisp as you'd expect without zooming? Well, that depends entirely on your display. When there's more pixels in the photo than can be displayed at once while viewing, the extra pixels are removed through various algorithms that do usually passable jobs at doing such. So while the detail is there, it may not be possible to show without zooming. But if you compress the heck out of the photos, there's nothing to zoom into. Sure would be a joy to look at this photos on something like an Apple Pro Display with 6016x3384 pixels.

And writing that just gave me an actual reason to purchase an 8K TV. There's not really much content that can use an 8K TV (plus at normal distances you eye would have trouble seeing the differences, especially with compression. But an 8K TV is 7680x4320 pixels, enough to actually view the images from my camera at 100% without zooming or loosing any pixels, with only a small black border around them. Dammit, that's more money than I wanted to spend, but the ability to view high res images I take like that...

Okay, I need to stop rambling and go do something else before I spend $3500 on a TV.

...LG has 77" 8K OLED TV's...only $20k. Okay, yup, not spending what I just spend on a vehicle on a TV, regardless of how absolutely amazing looking at photos may be on that TV...