“How to avoid blurry/pixelated Facebook cover photos”

Since Facebook unveiled the cover photo on your profile or page, user engagement has increased and people are being able to express themselves even more than before.

Unfortunately Facebook have also decided to use an utterly rubbish compression algorithm to resize your cover photo, making it look horrible and pixelated. See these examples below of a banner we have recently uploaded to the MailBigFile Facebook page.

Firstly this is what we uploaded.

And this below is what Facebook did to it.

As you can see in the image above – there are signs of heavy compression around the text. The background pattern has effectively disappeared and it generally looks unprofessional and nasty.

So how do we combat this you may ask? All you need to do is follow a few simple steps…

1. Upload your image with the correct dimensions

Make sure the image dimensions are 851px x 315px. These dimensions are what Facebook actually displays the cover photo as, so uploading it in as the correct size prevents scaling and cropping.

2. Remember to leave a space where your profile picture will be.

Your profile picture actually overlaps your timeline cover photo in the bottom left. Make sure you leave space in your image design. We have created a great Photoshop template so you can easily create your own cover photo. Download it here.

3. Most importantly, the image size.

You must make sure that the size of your image weighs in at less than 100KB mark. The best way to do this is to use Photoshop’s ‘save for web’ feature. The ‘save for web’ dialogue box is really useful as it gives you a live preview of the quality at that specific setting. Make sure you select JPEG from the from dropdown box. Use the quality slider until your file size is showing as under 100KB.

That’s it! Now upload your file to Facebook and as long as it is under the 100KB mark then your cover photo will look fantastic!