Facebook photos don’t have to be fuzzy
A huge problem with Facebook is that you upload a beautiful photo for your profile picture or a cover photo on your page to represent the awesomeness that is your brand, but when it is live for all to see, it has somehow become grainy. You’ve tried everything, even downloading free cover photos from services, thinking that would help, but as in the before/after image above, there is a distinct difference between what you see before and after you download your image to Facebook.
No matter the type of photo, you can do something about this. We gave you some pointers last year that improved the process but did not perfect it. AGBeat reader and designer Michael Bacon noticed that the images were still slightly fuzzy. We all know fuzzy leaves a bad first impression, especially if your industry is one that involves anything creative or marketing – you’re supposed to know how to put your best foot forward.
And now for the fix:
That said, Bacon discovered a way to fix fuzzy photos. He tells AG, “Facebook uses JPG compression of about ‘5’ in the quality setting which crunches the image up and is more the culprit as to why things look fuzzy / bad. What I have found is if you save your image from an image editing application like photoshop and don’t use the highest setting of “12” when you save the image JPG, rather save it to “10” FB seems to leave the compression setting alone and use the higher compression format.”
Bacon added, “I just did this with a cover image that was really high contrast / high color and it worked just fine. I had used the same image with its highest quality settings and exact pixel resolution for the FB cover image and it crunched it horribly… the “10” setting does add a little compression artifacting, but it’s pretty negligible and retains most of the image information. Seems like that’s the best way to get around the FB re-compression when uploading.”
Genius!
Margaret Goss
August 16, 2013 at 1:52 pm
Hi – not sure what you mean by saving the jpg as a 10 or a 12. I use Microsoft Picture Manager.
Duh
April 18, 2016 at 1:28 am
He means what he said, did you read the article at all? Use Photoshop!!!
Cher
September 11, 2017 at 10:43 pm
Not everybody can afford a $500 Photoshop program.
PeteHealy
August 17, 2013 at 10:00 am
Plus, Bacon’s quote is so poorly edited – use correct punctuation! – that it’s very hard to understand.
Pablove Megan
September 3, 2013 at 3:27 pm
This doesn’t help with text-based images on Pages/timelines. We’ve tried png, gif, jpg, 404×404 to 2048×2048. Always looks fuzzy and terrible. Any ideas?
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Cheryl
June 29, 2015 at 2:48 pm
I was changing the "zoom" from 100 to 75 on my facebook page trying to stop some problems I was having with a game freezing. Suddenly all my pics, even things that other people posted on my page were blurry. It wasnt like that before. Any suggestions and yes, I did put it back to 100, no change.
maja
January 2, 2016 at 11:32 am
Try to reset factory, it did erase the blurry news feeds on fb.
Hope this help
linda
January 29, 2016 at 10:19 am
My photos are visible for a few days and then blurred and I can no longer see the comments or comment myself. I’ve tried asking fb, but nothing
Serena Star Leonard
February 26, 2016 at 11:23 am
Thanks so much! I was really struggling with this, and it took me a while to figure out what you mean, but it works! It’s not 100% but it is nearly there and the text looks much better!