Photos being resized automatically

I mentioned in my earlier post that unadulterated and better resolutions photos would be available in my Facebook account. Well I did some experiment and found this not to be true.

My original photo is 2.26MB at 2448 x 3264 pixels. When uploaded to Facebook, it was automatically reduced to 43KB at 453 x 604 pixels. When uploaded to this Blog, it was reduced to 217KB at 1200 x 1600 pixels, regardless of whether I chose “small”, “medium” or “large”. So this Blog delivers better resolutions photos than Facebook.

My first thought was perhaps the article published in the New York Times website on 26 April 2009 has some basis. It claims that Facebook is considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs been delivered to some regions in an effort to reduce expenses. The article states that some global web companies (like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Veoh) are thinking of restricting access or lowering service standards to regions, like the developing countries, which prove costly to operate as the revenue generated from advertising in these regions does not cover the cost of operation, in an effort to boost their profit margins. The popularity and growth of these sites in developing countries eat up costly bandwidth which does not commensurate with revenue generated.

So to test whether this is true, I send my original 2.26MB photo to a friend in US and asked him to upload it to his Facebook account and then download it. The result was the same: the photo was automatically resized to 43KB at 453 x 604 pixels. Perhaps Singapore is not considered to be one of these “developing countries”.

Anyway, I will still reduce the pixels size, for faster download, and marked each photos, for security, that are uploaded to this Blog. I may or may not put another in my Facebook account. Thus if you are interested in any of the photos here and want the original just let me know and I will email it to you.