How to Reduce Image Size Without Losing Quality on Facebook
Social media currently accounts for 31.24 percent of total site visits. Surprisingly, Facebook alone accounted for approximately one-quarter of all visits received by publishers in December 2014.
It makes sense for you, as a blogger or brand marketer, to optimise your visual assets in order to increase audience engagement and interaction with your social media postings.
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Image Sizes Accepted
When posting to Facebook, be sure that each picture appears properly for your fans, friends, and followers to view. The following image widths are officially supported by Facebook, and Nasim Mansurov, author and creator of Photography Life, points out that link thumbnails and profile photographs have pre-set proportions as well:
Photos for status updates: 720 px, 960 px, 2048 px
Cover images: 851 px x 315 px
Thumbnails for Full Width Links: 484 px x 252 px
180 px by 180 px for the profile image in the header
Every day, around 350 million images are uploaded to Facebook by users. Facebook compresses the size of your photographs to support those files at scale, so they may not always be as clear as the original. Having said that, adhering to its approved picture sizes helps you to guarantee that the graphics you post seem as nice as they can.
When uploading a 2048 px picture, be sure you pick the High Quality option. When uploading your cover picture, make sure the file size is less than 100 KB to prevent compression.
Change the Photoshop Preferences to Reduce the Size of a Photoshop File
Changing the preferences is the next option we’ll utilise to reduce file size. Set Maximize PSD File Compatibility to Never in Edit > Preferences > File Handling. Alternatively, change it to Ask whether you wish to utilise this feature or not each time you save the picture.
This strategy, like the first with the solid colour layer, may have varying outcomes in terms of file size reduction. In my situation, it assisted me in reducing the size by just 3 MB. The biggest disadvantage is that your file may cause issues with previous versions of Photoshop and other apps. As a result, we believe that in most circumstances, this is not the best option.
Save the file as a Layered Tiff to reduce file size.
To make the size smaller, save your project as a layered TIFF file. All you have to do is go to File > Save As, select.tiff as the file type, and then set Image and Layer Compression to ZIP before clicking the OK button.
I was able to save 46 MB of disc space thanks to the layered TIFF file format. The nice part is that you can quickly open this TIFF file while keeping all of your adjustment layers and smart objects completely editable. The disadvantages are that it takes longer to save the file and that some applications do not support layered TIFF files (especially if you use specific Photoshop layers such as smart objects, adjustments layers, etc.).
How to Compress a File to a Zip Archive to Reduce File Size
Another apparent way to reduce the size of Photoshop files is to use archive software such as WinZip. We compressed my file using WinRar using the “best” compression option, which resulted in a 38 MB size decrease. This is a really simple approach to reduce the size.
Image Resizing and Compression on Facebook
Facebook was bad at resizing photographs a few years ago. If you uploaded a picture back then, it would not only appear terrible since it was compressed so much, but it would also remove the colour profile. Your photos would appear nothing like they did on your computer if you were not cautious about the resolution you resized to and if you exported them in anything other than sRGB. Since then, a lot has changed for the better — Facebook’s picture processing engine has grown much more powerful and better, thus most of the concerns of the past have been happily rectified. Nonetheless, as mentioned in this article, Facebook suggests resizing photographs to certain resolutions before posting them.
Regular Photos: 720 x 960 px, 2048 x 2048 px
Cover Images: 851 px x 315 px
Thumbnails for Full Width Links: 484 px x 252 px
180 px by 180 px for the profile image in the header
According to the statistics above, the three optimum resolutions for extracting photos are 720, 960, and 2048 pixels. What we needed to know was what happens when photographs of this and other sizes are uploaded. What effect does it have on a picture if it is uploaded at 980 pixels instead of 960 pixels? What happens if a different colour profile, such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, is unintentionally used? Let’s have a look at these case situations and see what happens.
Combining Reduction Techniques for the Best Outcome
Finally, we decided to try many strategies at once to see how they affected the size of my PSD template. We compressed all of the photos and textures, then trimmed all of my textures’ extraneous components. Following that, we combined the layers (except the smart objects) and eliminated all of the unnecessary invisible layers. The canvas was then reduced in size from 1500 to 1200 px. we made all of the layers invisible before saving the file, and then we compressed the final file to the.zip format with maximum compression.
Using all of these strategies at once reduced the file size to just 28 MB! What’s more, all of the smart objects are still completely customizable, and we didn’t lose too much quality.
Colour Space Conversion on Facebook
When you compare the two photographs above to the first, you will see that the colours are identical. This implies that Facebook’s picture reduction technology automatically converts Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB to sRGB.
