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by kamjam 4923 days ago
Why would I want to print low res, highly compressed images from Facebook?

Maybe if they were from a friend's feed and they wouldn't email me the originals for some reason or for convenience... but when they are my own pictures and I have the originals... doesn't make sense to me.

2 comments

It makes the photos you are tagged in available to print, I know for me at least, that most of those photos are not mine. And when I go to print some, I am printing photos from multiple friends. You can imagine how painful it would be to go to multiple people (especially if they are not your best friends) and ask them to find specific photos from some point in time and send them to you, then you still have to go and print them. In the end the photo quality maybe better but it would take much longer than a few minutes, if you even receive all the photos you want.

The older photos on Facebook are pretty low res, but they do now have higher res ones available and are the proper res for 4x6 prints, I believe they have had this since adding the full screen image viewer.

Yes, I've seen the "Upload in High Res" option in FB and usually use it myself - there is a big difference even viewing on screen and I've had some images grain very badly. I just checked the res is 2048 x 1366 - but I have no idea if that is good enough for print at that size. Guess it would depend on the image.

I very rarely print stuff these days but I can understand the convenience factor - I'm probably not your ideal demographic anyway since I very rarely print, it would not be that that inconvenient for me. Plus I only have one friend :(

As I mentioned in another reply, if you upload in high res, and your uploaded image is big enough for a decent print, you will be able to print photos at 10x15cm without an issue. Any bigger of a photo, low resolution issues will appear.
I work at a company that prints tens of millions of photos every year, and that has a Facebook integration app.

Actually, the image quality you get from FB through their API is dependent on both the photo size that is being uploaded, and the quality you ask facebook to save your photo at. A high resolution photo that is uploaded to Facebook in high quality mode is a good photo for a 10x15cm print. Any bigger print size and you start running into resolution issues.

The trick here is to show the user which photos he will have low resolution issues, and which he won't.