The fact that Facebook is the largest photo sharing site in the world is a dubious claim at best. That’s like saying George W. Bush is the president of the US when we all know there more intelligent people pulling the puppet strings. I use Facebook to share my (social) photos, and it is adequate in what it does (particularly useful is the face-tagging mechanism); but I have two main beefs with it.

First, Facebook decides to resize all my photos to some weird dimension (604×453 for curious geek types) for reason I can only conjecture is that any wider and the photos will break the rigid layout. That’s a small picture considering I think 1024×768 should be the bare minimum now. It would not be that bad if the photos were sharp, but during the resizing process; Facebook also compresses and lowers the quality of the JPGs. Not too noticeable if your photos are from P&S but you can see a remarkable difference in dSLR shots. I can understand that Facebook wants to save space as they’re up to over 5 Terabytes of photos, but it’s not good from a user POV (and thus will never replace Flickr, SmugMug, or any other real photo sharing site).

Secondly, I hate how people spam their photos. Just because there’s a facility to upload as many photos as you want, doesn’t mean that you should upload your “Vacation photos – Day 6, Part 4” (seriously I’ve seen this from multiple friends). I don’t know how much time you spend flipping through your friends’ photos, but if there are more than 30, I tend to blank out, squint at the little thumbnails and pick maybe one or two that seem interesting. Uploading all your photos from your trip only serves to inflat Facebook’s photo sharing numbers if no one has the patience or interest to go through them. I sure don’t, even if I’m stalking you.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: facebook, photography, webgeek