14 DAY TRIAL // You wouldn't realize it on first thought, but Facebook has been for quite a while the largest photo site in the world and by a significant margin. Thanks to its 350 million users all uploading important and many times interesting photos of themselves, the social network can be considered a photo hosting site as much as anything else. However, likely a direct repercussion of the amount of photos uploaded, the size of photos hosted and displayed has been rather restrictive a maximum of just 604 pixels. Self-portrait artists around the world can rejoice, Facebook is finally increasing the size of the photos. Not too much rejoicing though, they're not getting any bigger than 720 pixels.
"Starting this Wednesday, January 20, we're increasing the size of the largest photo a user can upload to 720 pixels (up from 604). We're releasing this feature to a limited set of users, and will slowly release it to all users over the next three weeks," a note on the Facebook Developers page reads.
Facebook decided to give developers a heads up first so they can adjust their apps to the new photo size. "If you're querying the photo FQL table or using photos.get to return the src_big image, you'll need to accommodate for the larger size of these images when styling your application or site," warns Facebook.
An announcement from the company will likely follow once the feature is live for all users, as the change is a pretty significant one if only by the amount of people it will affect. Interestingly though, Facebook might have also inadvertently revealed that its upcoming redesign, that we've been spotting in the wild for a couple of months now, will also be available for everyone in the next few weeks as the photo size increase may be linked to that.
Another clue is that the profile pictures are also getting a size change, though for the worse in this case, as they are getting smaller. "In the next few weeks, we're also changing the size of the largest profile picture to 180 pixels wide by 540 pixels high (down from 200 pixels by 600 pixels)," Facebook added.