[BruceBanner]

Hello everybody, hope you're all having a lovely Sunday

I just wanted to quickly ask if there was any good specific settings for exporting a file from LR that is going to work best for the Facebook platform. I'm talking optimized for highest level quality possible for sharing images on my business page, groups etc.

I recently was alerted to the fact that one of my images was uploaded and was just ghastly rendered.

I uploaded this image below, which sits on my flickr and was exported from LR with just typical LR (for flickr) export settings;



Here's where things get a little weird. That file is a 10.6mb file, dimensions 6054x4678. I then uploaded that exact same file to two different groups on Facebook that I am a member of ('Pentaxians' and 'Pentax Portrait Photography'). On the Pentaxian page I inspected the image and can see it's been given a file size of only 123kb with dimensions of 2048x1582. However... the same file uploaded onto the Pentax Portrait Photography became a measly 37kb file at a dimension size of 960x741! Suffice to say it looks awful!

I have no idea why these files differ in size, pixelation and quality, but I think I need to take this more seriously now and either optimise a way to export files for Facebook properly (so that hopefully it feels it doesn't need to 'do anything' to the image and it can be kinda left as is, or understand what's going on a little better. For example, I have noticed when creating a post and uploading an image, the image can be done super fast and the post ready to be published, however if you upload an image in the comments you can see a progress bar and the upload time far far longer, as if the comments section is actually uploading the full version, or at least accepting the full image first and then doing something to it afterwards.

I have never used the Library>Publishing feature (of LR) before, and I don't really want to have to continually adjust my export settings for LR each time I want to spit out one best quality export and one that is a compromise for FB. Is there a way to just get a good FB version from LR, maybe even export two Jpgs at a time, one for keeps and the other for FB? I don't actually want every export to end up on FB, just really the file so that I can place it in groups and pages that I want (rather than say my personal account etc).

TIA!

Bruce

[pschlute]

I dont use those export utilities in LR, but would make the following observations.

FB is not a photo sharing site and your image is going to have "something" done to it when uploaded to reduce the file size. My most recent upload to FB, directly from my computer, was 1440 pixels square and 1.2MB. Downloading the image from FB it is still 1440 pixels square but now only 200KB. All exif information is stripped too.

I would suggest to anyone uploading images to any online platform to resize the image yourself before uploading. Your 6054x4678 image is going to be resized by FB using their own process over which you have no control. No-one has a screen resolution that big so best to resize to a resolution that will be used by most FB users who will view your photo. My screen has a resolution of 2560*1440 which is larger than the average I suspect. I would not upload anything bigger than that pixel dimension to FB.

[MossyRocks]

I've found that facebook likes to resample things regardless of how big or small of an image you uploaded. I've uploaded tight crops of whirlpool galaxy taken with a 300mm lens where the crop is only around 150x150 pixels and that gets resampled to crap with a ton of artifacts introduced. I've had better luck with noisy and/or very busy images so I would assume the optimizations they use are tailored for those types of images so a nice smooth clean image with good subject isolation ends up looking like noisy busy image taken with a cellphone camera. I started using shutterfly for images and it even has a share on facebook option that shares the real image you uploaded to them, not the resampled mess that facebook creates.

[BruceBanner]

I dont use those export utilities in LR, but would make the following observations.

FB is not a photo sharing site and your image is going to have "something" done to it when uploaded to reduce the file size. My most recent upload to FB, directly from my computer, was 1440 pixels square and 1.2MB. Downloading the image from FB it is still 1440 pixels square but now only 200KB. All exif information is stripped too.

I would suggest to anyone uploading images to any online platform to resize the image yourself before uploading. Your 6054x4678 image is going to be resized by FB using their own process over which you have no control. No-one has a screen resolution that big so best to resize to a resolution that will be used by most FB users who will view your photo. My screen has a resolution of 2560*1440 which is larger than the average I suspect. I would not upload anything bigger than that pixel dimension to FB.

I've found that facebook likes to resample things regardless of how big or small of an image you uploaded. I've uploaded tight crops of whirlpool galaxy taken with a 300mm lens where the crop is only around 150x150 pixels and that gets resampled to crap with a ton of artifacts introduced. I've had better luck with noisy and/or very busy images so I would assume the optimizations they use are tailored for those types of images so a nice smooth clean image with good subject isolation ends up looking like noisy busy image taken with a cellphone camera. I started using shutterfly for images and it even has a share on facebook option that shares the real image you uploaded to them, not the resampled mess that facebook creates.

Thanks fellas for the input.

For the FB groups I typically always link back to my flickr the image in FB, so if people like what they see enough then they can click the flickr link and inspect better over there (similar to how we have it here, my images are clickable to flickr etc).

The issue is that I need to pay more attention to my photography page, every time I have had a paid job its via Facebook that the client found me. So although Facebook ins't a photo sharing sight, it seems to be a large proportion of how we togs get business (vs Instagram or Flickr).

I have noticed that FB has stopped supporting LR for publishing direct to FB (as of Aug 2018), not even sure why the link and publishing service is still there :/

So I did a little googling and I think general timeline photos, if you restrict the resoloution of the Long Edge to being 2048, then apparently that works best. You can 'sharpen for screen' and have set as standard. Perhaps exporting from LR with these settings will hopefully keep the evil fb away from wrecking the photo too badly...