How to get sharp images on Facebook links and adverts?

[Theskichick]

So he can be a real goodie and tell me what the secret formula is here? The question is how to get sharp looking images on Facebook header images and link images.

As we know regular photo uploads and images in posts tend to appear as normal. But when posting a link to Facebook or uploading a header image (either to a personal profile or to a group/page header) these will tend to come out blurry and looking very messy.

I've looked through several articles which all suggest different techniques and these seem to revolve around using images which are the correct height and width dimensions but scaled up. The theory being that Facebook will scale them down automatically but hopefully some resolution is maintained. That never seems to happen though. I can use images which are 4000px wide and they still look blurry when published.

I am sure you will have all seen the problem before but I've added an example and, particularly around the text, you can see a huge difference.

Can anybody let me know the actual and proper thing to do here?

[Test Screen Name]

The problem is easily seen in the picture you post. It looks as if the problem is artefacts from JPEG compression.

By submitting a big picture you will force the JPEG to be compressed again, which always harms quality. JPEG is really not considered suitable for text areas at all, only for photos. You may not be able to escape that. 

Two things to try, please let us know the results

1. Make the image at exactly the right size, so Photoshop does not need to scale. 

2. Save it as PNG not JPEG.

[Theskichick]

Thanks for the reply. All sounds good. But of course, the very first thing I did was to ensure the image was exactly the correct dimensions. Haven't tried using PNG's yet though so thanks for that, will give it a try.

If it's OK I will also post results here for future readers.