What's happening in Facebook and Flickr's darkroom?

I originally started out this post with a more jarring title, something like "Facebook Destroys Pictures," but I decided to calm down a bit before I started bashing a free service that lets you post all the pictures you want and doesn't even make that much money doing it. I started digging into things after I viewed some of my friend Simon's wedding pictures in a Facebook photo album the other day. They appeared to be the same picture that I had posted on Flickr the previous day - at full quality - but something seemed a little different. (To get them on Facebook, Claire saved them in the "original format" - really big - from Flickr, then posted them to Facebook. It's a bit of a round about way of doing things, but there were only a few pictures she wanted to post). I took some screenshots, so this is the way it was displayed on my monitor, and I've hosted them on my domain, so I know they're the original screenshots I took, composed together, and exported at the highest quality from Photoshop (pardon the wide image):

So, as you can see, the bottom left and right are the most "original" pictures I have, unless you want to see the "original original" after I touched it up (ha, of which I also have here ;) 2.54MB). Those original pictures look pretty good, and that's the way I wanted them to look. But if you take a look at the Facebook copy (scaled down with Photoshop from 604px wide to 500px wide to match Flickr's) in the upper left, things are a little strange. Simon (the studly character on the left) has his face darkened a bit, as if time were flipped a little bit - taking his honeymoon first, then having the wedding afterwards. Tim (the studly-as-well guy next to him) looks like he was Simon's travel buddy instead of Rachel, given the burnt look of Tim's face. Also, the seemingly unimportant but surprisingly annoying to me background window is almost gone, and the viewer is left with only their imagination to wonder what those floating yellow lights are.

(Edit: On my work monitor, Simon and Tim don't actually look quite as burnt as they do on my mac monitor at home, just darker in the wrong places.)

Also, the column's a little dark looking too, but that begins to nit-pick a little bit too much. Anyway... what the heck is going on here? Well, my guess is that Facebook is trying to make things a little bit easier to transfer (as I mentioned, they don't make that much money, why waste money serving up high quality pictures to people who don't click on any ads/pay for any subscription) and so they're picking and choosing which colors make it into their new "optimized" image for your viewing pleasure. This way the jpeg compression has more to compress because the pixels have more chances to be similar than in the original shot. And darn it if they didn't do a bang up job. You can still see that there are two people in the picture, they are both human, and they both are jovial. I'm not giving them enough credit - the picture looks pretty good - pretty good for being a good bit over half the original size (compared by using Aperture to size down the original to the Facebook dimensions: 604x405). In fact, the picture I would have liked Facebook to display is 2.33 times the size of the one they chose to display, which theoretically saves them 2.33 times the money. Actually, I'd say it's a pretty good compression method.

Well good job Facebook - You don't make any money directly from me, especially since I don't click on your ads or buy your fake digital "gifts" to send people. But I do pay another company around 2 dollars a month to host my pictures in a (in my opinion) nice way for others to see in their original glory - Flickr. Let's look at that composition one more time - there's a reason I included the Flickr picture - compare it (original, screenshot from Flickr's standard view) to either of the two on the bottom, and you'll see that Simon and Tim don't look burnt anymore, but perhaps a bit older. Their sleek boyish features have been turned into sharp glares, cutting into my soul by Tim's wrinkley "enraged" forehead, and Simon's cheek border which make him look like a "seething monster":

(Aperture 500px wide):

(Flickr 500px wide):

Ok, I overutilized the thesaurus on this one, and I went over the top with criticizing Flickr too, because all they did was add some more definition to the image. I suppose I can live with that because I can still make out the window behind them and if I wasn't sure what tire company's blimp logo was on Simon's name tag, I can certainly read it now. But still, I want to know why they did that. Same reason as Facebook? I'm actually not sure because when I downloaded the picture from Flickr, it clocks in at 82.79 KB, and when I sized it to 500px wide using Aperture, I got 60KB, so the dead original, looking good, is actually smaller than the one Flickr serves. This is most likely because my software knows I'll wait for it to do the proper calculation, while Flickr probably does some sort of time/cost analysis to figure out that it's worth it to serve ~20KB more for my photo than to do precise image scaling and retain it's original look.

Or another theory (probably the more likely of the two) is they feel that on a smaller scale, more definition is usually better because it's harder to see what's going on in the picture without it. I don't feel Simon and Tim have quite so much definition in their faces in the larger versions of the picture than they do in the smaller version. The engineers at Yahoo and Flickr tend to know what they're doing, so they probably did this on purpose. They obviously have a keener eye for pictures than Facebook does, as they're a picture sharing site, whereas Facebook isn't a site explicitly designed for sharing pictures. Maybe the information about Flickr's practices is posted somewhere and I don't know where to find it, if it's out there, leave me a comment showing me where it is :)

Now that I'm thinking about it, I should probably see what Google and Picasaweb (free to an extent, just like Flickr, but less free than Facebook, with no option to pay anything) are doing to your pictures. Are they pure and natural, just as you intended, or has definition and evil background removal been placed on top of them for the sake of saving a few dollars? Find out when I put it to the test, sometime soon.

Thanks for reading

-Matt