Introducing Your Super Large, High-Resolution Face on Facebook

Facebook already holds loads of our photos — and by loads, I mean an average of more than 250 million photos uploaded each day. But now it really wants to be your main photo album, by allowing full-screen viewing of high-resolution photos on its Web site.

The social networking giant announced the upgrade to Facebook Photos in a blog post today. Over to the right, you can check out what Bambi looked like, before and after (click on image to enlarge).

There are a couple of limitations to this. For one, sharing high-res photos to Facebook is a Web-only feature, which isn’t much of a shocker, since many mobile photo files are compressed before sharing, and Facebook’s mobile app doesn’t include a lot of the features available on the social networking site. And on the Web, the full-screen photos can only be viewed using the latest version of Firefox or Chrome.

But for people who spend a lot of time creeping on — I mean, browsing through — other people’s Facebook photos, crisp, full-sized images may be a welcome addition. The maximum resolution for an image to be uploaded to Facebook’s photo viewer is 2,048 by 2,048 pixels — big enough so it doesn’t lose its quality when it expands to the scale of the browser screen.

Last year, it was reported that Facebook was considering adding photo filters to mobile Photos, but a spokesperson for the company says there’s no update on that.