Facebook’s Rolling Out High-Resolution Photo Sharing

As a big fan of photo-sharing site Flickr, one of the most frustrating things about the popularity of photo sharing on social-networking site Facebook has always been the relatively terrible quality of Facebook’s highly compressed photos. Starting today, that’s changing.

Over the next few weeks, Facebook will be rolling out support for high-res pictures for free to every user:

We’re increasing the size of the photos stored from 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest edge, for an 8 times increase overall. I’m really excited to be launching this feature. To see the quality of these pictures, you can view National Geographic’s “Top-Rated Your Shot Photos (September)” album or Sports Illustrated’s “Football Across America” album. Download high-resolution photos by clicking the “Download” link.

They’re also updating their photo viewer with a new lightbox interface (think Flickr’s new galleries—dark background with the image popping out in the forefront). Chances are you’re not seeing any of the updates in your account yet, but the rollout starts today, so if you aren’t, you can expect it in the near future.

More Beautiful Photos [Facebook Blog]