In my last article, I discussed the new “Reposition Image” option for photos displayed on your Facebook Timeline. Whether you are a fan of Timeline or no, you can take advantage of this new feature: Highlight.
In this standard Timeline view you can see the picture of the singing meadowlark is cropped awkwardly. We could reposition it as I detailed in the previous article to make the images’ subject more powerful within the square aspect-ratio window, or we could invoke the new Highlight feature. The red arrow in the image above shows the Highlight option.
Clicking the Highlight star does two things. One, it gives you a much wider view of your image, and two, it makes it span both of the columns in your Timeline. You now have a panoramic window in which to view your image. The new image is slightly more than a 2:1 aspect ration making it a legitimate Panoramic Crop. When I measure it out, the window is roughly 840×400 pixels: 2.1:1 – very cinematic.
The Reposition option is still available to you to fine-tune your landscape image up or down to make the window show a more pleasing rendition of your image. All-in-all, it is a nice solution for displaying your images in a stronger fashion.
Of course, with all things Facebook, it doesn’t work everywhere. If you try to highlight a portrait orientation image, this is the result. Not very good, is it? There is too much white space around the image. A better solution would be to take portrait images and leave them single column but show the full height of the image. They would gain impact and not cause design or page flow to suffer.
With the advent of the Reposition and the Highlight features, Facebook is taking a positive step towards the proper and more aesthetically pleasing display of your photos. They should be lauded for this but encouraged to go the rest of the way.
Take a little time and add Highlighting and Repositioning to your Facebook arsenal.
Next time we will talk about the Missing Aspect Ratio on Facebook.
Rikk Flohr © 2012
