14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has decided that its 400 million or so users deserve to see a little more of their friends or even of themselves. Quite literally. New photos uploaded to Facebook will now be precisely 116 pixels wider, as the size limit increased from 604 to 720 pixels, an almost 20-percent increase if you want to have clear metric. The move has been known for a while now and it's unclear if it is accompanied by a reduction in size of the profile photos, as it was initially announced.
"When it comes to viewing photos, we think bigger is better. We've begun increasing the maximum size for photos on Facebook by almost 20 percent to 720 pixels to give you higher quality photos and make viewing them more enjoyable," Facebook developer Nathaniel Roman wrote. "You'll start to notice the larger size as you upload new photos to Facebook or browse new photo albums from your friends. Older photos will remain in the previous maximum size of 604 pixels."
The change should be rolling out to all users in the next few days, after which any photo uploaded from the site will max out at 720 pixels wide or tall depending on the layout. External apps may have not implemented the change yet, so uploading from third-party tools might still limit the photos to 604 pixels. In any case, it should make the experimental photo slideshow feature all the more exciting.
This doesn't seem like much of a change, but anything affecting 400 million people shouldn't be taken lightly, as the recently introduced photo uploader, which caused a lot of headaches to a lot of people, proved.
The reason why the change is pretty major comes down to sheer scale. Taken alone, Facebook's photo feature is the largest photo-sharing and -hosting site in the world by a significant margin, dwarfing sites like Flickr, Picasa and even Photobucket. With millions of new photos uploaded every month and several billion images already hosted by Facebook, even a small change like this comes with a lot of headaches and big strain on the infrastructure, which serves a huge number of photos every second.
