However, Facebook doesn’t make it easy and there are lots of fan pages out there with garbled looking logos to prove it. For many, the first impulse when setting up an organization’s fan page is to upload whatever logo graphic is on file… without taking into consideration how Facebook’s going to re-size and then compress it. Unfortunately, logos with text and clean lines don’t scale or compress as cleanly as images of people with softer outlines. So, your otherwise clean, beautiful and sharp logo ends up looking squashed, desaturated and blurry when displayed on your fan page. Bleh.

Now, Facebook’s likely going to compress any picture you upload (it’s an easy way to save space and reduce bandwidth), but there’s still hope, which is where size really begins to matter. If you know Facebook’s going to re-size your image to a fixed width of 200px and then compress it, you might as well take the re-sizing bit out of the equation. Image editors like Photoshop or Fireworks are much better at scaling your logos and images than Facebook’s currently capable of. Pre-scaling your image to a width of 200px using Photoshop or Fireworks, gives your logo the best possible chance of being displayed neatly after it’s uploaded and compressed by Facebook.

Here are two examples of a logo/ image that I uploaded to one of my fan pages (I saved them from the fan page itself after they were uploaded):

The image on the left was originally a larger 285×403 px image that was both re-sized down to 200×283 px and compressed by Facebook… the image on the right was the same 285×403 px image, pre-scaled down to 200×283 px using Fireworks and then compressed by Facebook. As you can see, the image on the right is sharper, particularly around the text as well as the detail in the snow, and it’s not as desaturated as the image on the left. The image on the left almost appears out of focus.

To some, it might seem insignificant and you may go ahead and upload your image without first adjusting its size. However, remember that my original image wasn’t much wider than the size eventually displayed on Facebook (it only went from 285×403 px down to 200x283px). If the logo portion had been smaller in relation to its background image, the text would likely have ended up being even more blurry.

Because the only dimension Facebook holds fixed is the width (200px), it’s the only dimension you need to worry about when scaling your image. With the horizontal and vertical scales constrained in relation to one another in your image editor, simply set the width to 200px and let the height be whatever it may.

Quick Steps:

1. For the maximum amount of clarity, I recommend starting with the highest quality copy of your logo, and try to make it fill the width of the image you’ll be exporting (like the example above),

2. Scale your entire image in a constrained ratio down to a width of 200px in either Photoshop or Fireworks,

3. Export your image in the highest quality jpeg format possible and then upload it to your Facebook fan page.

Improving Facebook profile pictures and album photos

The same principal applies to Facebook profile pictures and album photos… although I don’t recommend scaling your profile pictures down to a width of 200 px, because you preferably want to allow your friends to be able to click on it and view a larger copy.

Photographers on the other hand may appreciate a little extra clarity in their album photos. In this case, I recommend uploading a single photo from your camera to Facebook to confirm what size it will eventually be displayed at. Once it’s on Facebook, right click on the expanded photo and save it to your computer. Check to see what the saved photo’s dimensions are. For example, lets say it turns out to be 604x453px… then you would pre-scale all your photos to those exact dimensions (apart from portraits of course) so that Facebook doesn’t re-size them for you, and you maintain as much quality as possible.

It might sound tedious, but you can run a large number of photos through a batch process in Photoshop or Fireworks quite quickly. If you’re a professional photographer, you might appreciate a little more detail in your photos and the extra step may be well worth it!