You and I may hate Facebook, but with almost a billion users, it’s the place where most people put their photos. And now, at least you won’t have to totally slum it if you visit: The customer-hostile social network will now serve hi-res photographs, but not — oddly — to the iPad.
Facebook has just announced hi-res photos and also full-screen viewing. Nowhere in the press release is the new iPad mentioned, but its fingermarks are all over the announcement. Facebook says that you will now see a link to a high-quality version in the Photo Viewer, and that these big images will be up to 2048 pixels wide. If that number sounds familiar, it’s because it is: 2048 is the number of pixels on the long side of the new iPad’s screen.
But there’s a catch: You need to be using Firefox or Chrome to see the new magical arrows. This is rather odd, and we’d expect that a future update will fix this, or at least allow iPad users to see high-res photos in the iPad Facebook app. I have tried working around the problem using browsers that allow you to spoof the user agent string, but so far I have been unsuccessful.
Another small change might have an even bigger effect, though. SRGB color profiles are now being added to photos. This means that modern browsers which support color profiles (which includes Safari this time) will show photos with accurate color. Except on OLED phablets, I guess, with their amped-up colors.
