Reposition

In my last article, I discussed the new “Reposition Image” option for photos displayed on your Facebook Timeline. Whether you are a fan of Timeline or no, you can take advantage of this new feature: Highlight.

In this standard Timeline view you can see the picture of the singing meadowlark is cropped awkwardly. We could reposition it as I detailed in the previous article to make the images’ subject more powerful within the square aspect-ratio window, or we could invoke the new Highlight feature. The red arrow in the image above shows the Highlight option.

Clicking the Highlight star does two things. One, it gives you a much wider view of your image, and two, it makes it span both of the columns in your Timeline. You now have a panoramic window in which to view your image. The new image is slightly more than a 2:1 aspect ration making it a legitimate Panoramic Crop. When I measure it out, the window is roughly 840×400 pixels: 2.1:1 – very cinematic.

The Reposition option is still available to you to fine-tune your landscape image up or down to make the window show a more pleasing rendition of your image. All-in-all, it is a nice solution for displaying your images in a stronger fashion.

Of course, with all things Facebook, it doesn’t work everywhere. If you try to highlight a portrait orientation image, this is the result. Not very good, is it? There is too much white space around the image. A better solution would be to take portrait images and leave them single column but show the full height of the image. They would gain impact and not cause design or page flow to suffer.

With the advent of the Reposition and the Highlight features, Facebook is taking a positive step towards the proper and more aesthetically pleasing display of your photos. They should be lauded for this but encouraged to go the rest of the way.

Take a little time and add Highlighting and Repositioning to your Facebook arsenal.

Next time we will talk about the Missing Aspect Ratio on Facebook.

Recent changes at Facebook allow you to have a little leeway in the process of how your images are displayed. It used to be you were stuck with whatever precropping Facebook did when displaying your image on your wall or your Timeline. If your image was not square, or worse still, Portrait, you took what you could get and that often wasn’t the most flattering crop of your image.

In the example above, the red-headed woodpecker is missing his head. Default positioning in Facebook decreed that the head be lopped off. In response to increasing competition for your social media time and the more photographer-friendly options out there among the competitors, Facebook now allows you to custom window your images.

If you click on the Edit icon that appears at the top-right of your image, you will see there is an option to Reposition Photo in the list of commands. Clicking this will allow you to grab your photo and slide it up and down or back and forth, depending upon the photo’s orientation, to create a more pleasing version of the image. This can be make or break for some images when competing for viewership.

A quick adjustment later and now the woodpecker has a head! As you post your pictures on Facebook, take a moment to double check the Timeline crop. Adjust it and more people might just take the time to view your image full-sized: maybe even like or comment!

You are limited to a square view and one direction of adjustment depending upon the landscape/portrait orientation of your original but it is definitely a step in the right direction. Facebook has a long way to go to compete for photographers’ attentions but you can’t fault this improvement.

Next time, we will talk about how Facebook has become panoramic-crop-friendly.