Export Photos for Sharing on Facebook? Many photographers like to share their photos on Facebook. However, this social medium is known to strongly compress photos. The photo you place there suddenly looks a lot less beautiful.
It is an often heard complaint: on the computer your photo looks excellent, but on Facebook the colors are different, the photo appears blurry and the images are blocky.
But why is that and, more importantly, how do you prevent such suffering?
Compression on Facebook
Because Facebook is such a large platform that all those photos that everyone in the world uploads have to store, there is a certain maximum size of the photos you put on it. When you want to post a photo that is larger, Facebook makes the photo smaller so that you can still post it. This is done by compressing the image. The photo is made smaller. Of course, you can never push the same number of pixels into a smaller photo, so it comes at the expense of quality. Sometimes you hardly see anything of that, but more often it makes your photo much less beautiful.
That is annoying, because when you put a photo on Facebook you naturally want it to be seen the way you intended it!
File size for Facebook
Facebook itself states that ordinary photos can be 720px, 960px or 2048px wide. Cover photos will be 851px by 315px. The files should not be larger than 100kB, and it is best to choose an sRGB color profile.
Export photo for Facebook with Lightroom
To save your edited photo for use on Facebook, you must use the ‘export’ function in Lightroom (file> export). When you click on it, a window will appear that may seem a bit complicated at first. But we help you.
- First tell Lightroom where you want to save the photo. At the export location you can choose a folder, by default it is set to the same folder as the original photo. You can also create a new folder. If you want to save several photos at once for Facebook, it might be useful to put them all together in a new folder.
- Choose the file format. Usually that is Jpeg, because it is the most common. You cannot upload RAW files on social media. Have you placed text in your photos? Consider Png, because in texts you see the quality reduction in Jpeg faster
- Under the file format you will also find the choice for color profile. Facebook recommends sRGB, so you can select it there.
- Below that you will find file size. Here you can enter the file size. Enter 2048 for the long border, or less. Lightroom then chooses the short side itself, so that the aspect ratio is preserved.
Better to do it yourself
If all goes well, Facebook no longer needs to apply compression; you have already done this yourself in Lightroom. This also applies to photos that you want to send with Messenger. You have better control over the result, where otherwise you are left to the compression of Facebook. A good idea to do it like this!
Also read: Lens distortion, what is it and what can you do about it?
