Ideal Image Resolution Size for Posting on Social Media

I just discovered that someone's been downloading my photos that I posted on Facebook and then uploaded one of my photos as his own. I confronted him about it and then unfriended him.

I know that image theft is inevitable, so this post isn't about how to prevent theft or placing copyright notification and so on. What I'd like to know is what's an ideal image resolution size for posting on social media, particularly Facebook, such that the viewers can enjoy my photos with full clarity and at the same time, should they decide to download, i.e., steal, my photos, they can't really do much with it except to re-posting elsewhere but not for the purpose of selling them?

From Facebook:

2048 pixels at the widest. Personally I find the 960 pixels is sufficient while not giving someone a higher quality image that could be used for something else (basically 1280 pixels widest for me for social media, and a water mark).

And then either use PNG, or high quality JPG.

Sadly this is why invasive watermarks dominate this stuff, unless you just accept that there will be people (or AI) taking your photos and doing stuff with them no matter what you do.

Very best,

MalVeauX wrote in post #18627320
From Facebook:

2048 pixels at the widest. Personally I find the 960 pixels is sufficient while not giving someone a higher quality image that could be used for something else (basically 1280 pixels widest for me for social media, and a water mark).

And then either use PNG, or high quality JPG.

Sadly this is why invasive watermarks dominate this stuff, unless you just accept that there will be people (or AI) taking your photos and doing stuff with them no matter what you do.

Very best,

Thanks for the info. I didn't know that FB had the image posting recommendations.

I used to publish everything to Flickr at 1024px on the long edge. This will still allow those who really want to to make a A4/Letter sized print from it. The vast majority of folks are actually more than happy with a print at 100 PPI. Still it is pretty limiting from a commercial point of view, although for many online uses it's still plenty big enough. I did move to 1280 px long edge when the forum changed it's posting limits. I shall not be going any higher though. One thing that you can do to also make people less likely to try to make prints from your images is to put stupidly high PPI values in the EXIF. Lots of software still reports the size of an image in physical dimensions based of the PPI value in the EXIF. So if you make your 1280 px long image show 1000 PPI then it will show up as being only 1.2" long. It will at least deter the vast proportion of the population who are generally ignorant of this.

Alan

What Mal said. Not really anything you can do except kindly ask the offender to stop.

Thanks everyone for sharing your methods and suggestions. One question I have:

Recently when I did a batch resizing of my photo files using my old PS, I set both the "W" and "H" to 1300 px (I've been playing around with different px to see the differences on my monitor) and one thing I noticed was that some files obviously ended up at near 2 MB file while some others at 1 MB. This has to do from having to set both W and H to 1300. Is having a file size to 2 MB make any difference in printing quality or monitor display quality?

If so, in order to bring the file size down, is the only way to do so is to setting the W and H to a lower px?

File size has a lot to do with the container you're using (such as JPG versus PNG).

Has nothing to do with print size. But compression can certainly have effects on the quality of the image which will effect display & print (such as really high compression, low quality JPG).

Very best,

I don't know what version of Ps you are using, for some time now Adobe has offered additional options, such as specifying the length of the longest edge. Setting both width and height to the same value has the same effect as using long edge so it doesn't really matter. When it comes to image file size, especially with JPEG, then that will change with the content of the image. Images with lots of areas with little fine detail will compress far more easily than those with lots and lots of small fine detail.

In general when dealing with Adobe products it doesn't matter if the JPEG compression scale is the 0-100 or the 0-12 one, they all only have 13 different compression levels. Because JPEG converts the image data from the usual RGB colour channels to a system based on luminance and chrominance channels similar to that of old analogue TV signals there is always a small conversion loss involved in storing an image file as a JPEG. After doing some tests I discovered that it was almost not possible to even measure the difference in the RGB channels for any pixel in an image that was saved at a compression level of 10 (80) or above. The comparison was made between an 8 bit uncompressed TIFF file made directly from a RAW and first generation JPEG versions made from the same image. There is though a much bigger difference between the level 10 JPEG and the level 12, but that is not what you should be measuring.

In general you should see a reduction of between 40% and 60% in file size between a L10 JPEG and the uncompressed image data. For a 3:2 ratio image, which is 3.22 MB when uncompressed, when saved at level 10 I would expect it to have a file size between 1.9 MB and 1.2 MB. Level 12 is basically convert to JPEG and save without any compression, and I have actually seen some maximum quality JPEG files that have been larger than the uncompressed TIFF file. File sizes will change if you crop to a different aspect ratio, for example if you make the image 1:1 by cropping ti square then it will end up being 1300×1300 pixels, and an uncompressed size of 4.83 MB. So you may also see quite a bit of change in file size if you crop to different aspect ratios too.

Alan