Saving images for Facebook, a common question in the world of photography. I am not here to tell you how you need to save your images for Facebook, I am here to tell you how I save mine, I am sure there are many ways. I have spent a lot of time with trial and error to find the best way to save my images for social media and blogging. There is nothing more frustrating than being excited about a beautiful image, you load it to Facebook and it looks terrible.
There are a few important things to go over before I go into the how to. First thing and one of the most important is your image size. When you load a full size image to Facebook, Facebook automatically compresses it, and not in a good way. So how do you avoid that? Well here is what I found out! Facebook only recognizes certain size images without compressing them, anything other than those sizes and it will automatically compress the image. Those sizes are 960px, 1024px, or 2048px on the LONGEST side of the image. Saving as one of those sizes will guarantee Facebook not to touch your image quality. Another common mistake I see is not converting the image to sRGB color space. This is a must and I do it for all of my images, whether they will be posted online or not.
I edit in both Lightroom and Photoshop, I do my basic adjustments in LR and then bring my images to PS to finish them. I have my settings in LR to automatically convert my images to sRGB when they are opened into PS. You can see instructions on how to do that HERE. This way, you don’t have to worry about remembering to do it, it will do it for you automatically.
So what size is best out of the three? Well I guess that really depends on personal preference, but for Facebook I like mine at 2048px. Now if you are saving images for a blog or website, you generally do not want them that large. For my blog and website I save at 960, why? Well when you have a website with a lot of images, you want them to load fast so your potential clients don’t have to sit there and stare at a frustratingly long load time. If you are anything like me, if a website takes too long to load, I just move on. So saving your images at a smaller size will keep the speed up while still having great looking images.
Now that I have covered the settings, what is next? The actual saving. Normally when you save an image, you go to file-save or save as. You do not want to save this way for online. Here are the steps…
File-Save for web: You will get a very confusing pop up box, but don’t worry, we aren’t going to change much. In the top right you will see a drop down box under where it says presets, when you click on it, it says GIF, JPEG, PNG etc. You want to select PNG-24. If you have not converted your image to sRGB yet, you can do this by checking the convert to sRGB box on the right. You can also resize you image at the bottom but I don’t like to do it this way because it takes longer for it to load up my “save for web” tab with a full size image. All that is left is to save your image and load it online! It really is that easy! If you are reading this thinking, what the heck are all these crazy terms? Well your answer is a google search away! I hope this helps everyone as I see the question floating around constantly and I know how confusing it is to figure it all out. Like I said, I am sure there are many other ways of doing this, this is just what works for me and it has yet to fail me. Happy shooting everyone!
Emma Stasko Photography specializes in newborn, baby, maternity, birth, child and family photography in Austin, Texas and surrounding areas including but not limited to Cedar Park and Round Rock.