Facebook ups its maximum photo size

Photos can now be as large as 720 pixels, almost 20% bigger than previous limit

Facebook announced Tuesday evening that the maximum photo size allowed on Facebook has been increased by almost 20% from 604 pixels to 720 pixels.

The picture provided is solely meant to represent the scale of the original max and new max side-by-side.

With these changes, Facebook hopes that allowing higher-quality photos on the site will make photo viewing that much more enjoyable. Though older photos will stay put at the previous maximum limit, users will now notice photos uploading at the higher resolution.

It's a minor update, but it demonstrates that Facebook recognizes that photo viewing and sharing between friends is one of the key components of the social networking site's ever-blooming popularity.

For the sake of comparison, Flickr, a dedicated image and video hosting site, has its maximum set at 1024 pixels. Upgrading to a Pro account, of course, gives users the option to upload their photos in their original size, no matter how large. Because Flickr clearly has the advantage here, a more fair comparison would be MySpace. As of now, MySpace lets users upload photos up to 600 pixels wide, pretty much the same as Facebook's original maximum.

Considering that Facebook sees over 3 billion photos uploaded to its site each month, it's no small wonder that the company wants to make sure that users continue to see the benefit in its service.

Facebook is rolling out the changes over the next few days and support for third-party applications will probably be slower to come.