Blog by Seeing

The first in a series of limited edition shirts have arrived for my friends at KeepSafe.

They want to wear KeepSafe clothing all the time, but standard startup shirts are boring and straight forward. So they commissioned me to design them a new wardrobe of shirts and apparel that look rad but don't advertise.

I'll give you the short story up front. After researching existing blog posts, doing my own research and talking with the Facebook Photos team, my conclusion is there is no system. It's inconsistent at best, and the photos team even admits "Sadly, cropping is a bit of the wild west at the moment." Let's dive in and see why.

The Old Desktop Newsfeed

Everything looks fine. Image is coming in at a perfect square, scaled at just above 50%.

The New Desktop Newsfeed 

When sharing directly from our app, the image is scaled even smaller at 394 x 394 px, and is strangely isolated.

Uploading that same image directly from my desktop yielded different results. It was displayed almost edge-to-edge at 526 x 394 px and cropped off the bottom.

To test again, I uploaded an "organic" image, aka an image without text that's not a screen cap. This time it displayed fully edge-to-edge at 552 x 414 px with cropping centered near the middle and meta data overlaid.

The New Desktop Timeline

This one's fun, too. My tests show Facebook either crops aligned to the top of the image, just above the middle, or the middle. It seems to choose the alignement at random. The size is 504 x 378 px.

iPad

The iPad displays our shared photos consistently with the crop centered at the middle. However the Timeline and the Newsfeed have a slightly different ratio, illustrated above. The Timeline displays at 351 x 235 px and the Newsfeed displays 625 x 468 px.

iPhone

Thank you iPhone! Fully edge-to-edge, no cropping or weirdness! The Newsfeed and Timeline display exactly the same at 309 x 309 px (618 x 618 px @2x).

Optimal Ratio

The best size for a Facebook image is 552 x 414 pixels. Anything above this size at a ratio of 3x4 will do equally well.

Remember that the new Desktop Timeline puts meta data over the first 66 px of your image, and lightbox puts a black bar over the last 35 px.

Conclusion

I'm still not clear on the mechanism behind image cropping on the new Newsfeed or Timeline on desktop. Why is app sharing different than desktop uploading? How does Facebook determine an organic photo vs. a synthetic photo?

Answers to these questions will make it easy for my users to share beautiful content with their friends on Facebook.

I'm loving the new Vessel branding from @hattery, but I wonder if the designers watched a little too much Oblivion before hand...

From the department of Woo Woo & Weirdness, I bring you this theory I've been mulling over.

I am connected to the Internet of the Universe, but instead of consuming information, I am the information. This evening, during meditation, I had an experience I can only describe as total presence. My awareness moved from head-based to heart-based. When that happened I stopped thinking about what I saw – and just saw it. When I stood, I just stood. When I sat, I just sat. Even now, the experience persists. When I focus on my chest, the colors get brighter, things get more still, and my analytical mind fades to the background. Whereas the analytical wants to contract around a concept, I feel a quality of knowing that lets go into experience, and fills up with understanding. What I learned this evening is that I cannot understand the mystery, but I can live the mystery. If I let go, I become it.

A vintage pin-up photo shoot for my childhood best friend Kaela.

To send a special gift to her man at sea, and to have some fun, we decided to do this shoot. Her vibe is inspired by the pin-up era, and the past in general, so the style of the shoot was a no brainer. We came up with two characters: a Mexican picnic girl and a sexy librarian. Of course, she had the fixings for both.

We spent the evening driving around Ann Arbor listening to salsa music, embarrassing ourselves and watching the sunset.