I find images all the time online that I’d like to make my ‘cover’ photo or my picture. (Sorry, not sure of the correct terminology.)
Seems like every time I do, however, I’m told by FB that my pic is too small or too large. From past experience, it seems like it’s actually the formatting of the pic that is the issue…that’s it not in jpeg.
How can I easily save a pic that I find on the Internet into the correct format to allow me to make it my cover photo? When I try to save a photo in jpeg, my lovely options do not include that option…usually I’m left with saving it in html and that doesn’t fly on FB. I’m talking about mostly political banners and the like.
If you’re getting the pics from the Internet, right click on it and choose save as. If HTML shows up as an option, you’re probably trying to save the page instead of the image.
Not at all. Facebook will accept images in JPEG, PNG, or GIF formats. If the original image is in some other format, you can convert with Microsoft Paint (Windows Vista and up) or the free Paint.net if you are still on XP.
That happens to me all the time. The image has to be at least 720 pixels wide.
I usually try to search for large images, or I just keep searching until I find one they will accept. I have tried messing with them in a photo program, but since I don’t know what I am doing, it’s never really worked.
Facebook can take your tiny little picture and blow it up to 720 pixels wide and it will look like absolute shit and then everyone will be like “why does Facebook make everyone’s cover photo look like absolute shit? What the hell good are they?”
Nobody can take a small non-vector photo and make it big and make it not look like absolute shit. What you see on CSI is a lie. There’s just not that much information in the image to make it that big.
So Facebook is telling you that the space is 720px wide and if your image is not that big or bigger, it’s not going to let you use it. It’s not MySpace, it’s civilized. You can take your image and put it in a photo manipulation app and make it bigger yourself, and you’ll be the one responsible for making it look like shit.
Or you can make a big canvas in a photo app that is 720px wide and then put your image on that canvas and then save it, then you’ve got a 720px wide image and your image is in there and it doesn’t look like shit cuz it hasn’t been stretched.
It’s not often that you run in to “political banners and the like” that are wide enough to meet FB’s requirement. There’s not too many random graphics of any kind on the Web that are that size. Photos, on the other hand, are probably going to come out of a camera 800x600 or larger (often much larger). That’s kind of what Facebook is intending for you to use.
If you want to use some graphics to go up there, you’re going to have to make your own and make them fit yourself. Facebook isn’t going to be responsible for making it look nasty.
If you are talking about those banner images, 720px actually seems kinda small. Most screens are nearly double that resolution or higher, and the image takes up more than half the width of the screen. So they are already scaling somewhat.
If you find a nice image online and it’s too small, you can drag it to your desktop, then go to Google Image Search and drag it back onto the search field, and from there choose to look for large versions of the image. You can even specify exact size, if you wanted. Also, if the exact image isn’t available in large, other similar pics should come up and you might find one from there that suits anyway.
That is the long way to do it, so I have a right-click image search to speed that kind of thing up, but I can’t remember if that’s a part of my browser or if I added it with a plug-in.
