Facebook Increases Size of Timeline Profile Photos; Trying to Keep Up with Google+?

Tweet

You may have noticed that for the past few days the size of the profile photos on both our personal and business Timelines was fluctuating. Depending on the browser one was using sometimes the photo would appear at the normal size and then other times it would be quite a bit larger. Of course this prompted a lot of speculation that Facebook was changing the size to make profile photos larger in response to new larger size of Google+ profile photos. Others were reporting they thought it was a bug and then eventually reported that it was indeed a bug.

Well, apparently it wasn’t a bug and Facebook has increased the size of our personal profile photos from 125 pixels to 160 pixels square. For most of you this will be meaningless but for those of you who got creative and designed a profile photo that somehow integrated into your Timeline cover, you’re going to need to make a modification to get things to line up correctly again.

For now, the size of the profile photo on our business Timelines remains at 125 pixels square but I really can’t think of any good reason why Facebook would have two different sizes so I suggest being prepared to deal with those images magically growing at some point too.

By the way, there has been no confirmation of any of this in writing on an official Facebook page but according to a “spokesperson” who was contacted by ZDNet, “I can confirm we’ve increased the size of profile photos”. Personally I hate taking the word of a “spokesperson” considering how often they seem to be wrong, but for now, that’s the closest thing we have to an official confirmation.

Edit: Actual confirmation from Facebook has finally appeared via email indicating that profile photos for “Pages” will be changing on April 26. Here’s the text of the email.

“On April 26, we will be updating the size of the profile picture on all Pages. We are letting you know about this small change in advance so that you can update your profile picture on April 26. The new profile picture will be 160 x 160 pixels and will sit at 23 pixels from the left and 210 pixels from the top of the Page.”

Tweet