Inside Facebook

Facebook’s Platform team has just posted a note about a couple of potentially breaking upcoming changes to the way Facebook handles user photos and profile pictures. Here’s the upshot for developers:

1) Increased Maximum Photo Size Coming Tomorrow

Starting tomorrow, Wednesday, January 20, Facebook is increasing the maximum size of photos to 720 pixels from 604. Facebook says it is releasing this feature to a small number of users at first, but will be rolling it out to everyone over the “next three weeks.” Developers using  the photo FQL table or photos.get to return the src_big image will need to update their apps.

2) Decreased Profile Picture Size Coming Soon

Facebook also says it is changing the maximum size of profiles pictures to 180 x 540 (down from 200 x 600) “in the next few weeks.” You may need to change your apps if you are getting the pic_big image from the user FQL table or users.getInfo, or are rendering the normal profile picture with fb:profile-pic, according to Facebook.