The 2014 Guide to Multi-Photo Page Posts on Facebook

A few days ago, Facebook started rolling out it’s updated look for the News Feed on desktops globally. If any of you are wondering, although images appear bigger, the new look keeps all the same ad specs from the last design, it leaves all image aspect ratios intact and does not change any of your image-size requirements for Ad campaigns. I know this makes many people happy because of all the time and effort that they’ve been investing in creating these, and also into getting creative teams to comprehend them. But what changes with the new look, in terms of uploading multiple images?

Together with Facebook’s new look, multi-photo stories and photo albums will now look different!

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Whether you are publishing a multi-photo story or a photo album, you will have to comprehend the new way Facebook will be displaying these on the desktop News Feed. Please take note that the way they are displayed on mobile apps remains unchanged. So, let’s take a look at the details.

The new look on the desktop makes two distinctions.

What is the orientation of the first photo
How many photos have you uploaded

Also Read: Long Live the (New) New Facebook Redesign

First image is a square – On the desktop version of the platform if the first image is a square, if you upload just one image it will be shown as it is – without cropping. Similarly, if your first image of a series of two or more is a square, all others in the series will be cropped accordingly. Two images will appear as two squares next to each other, three will appear as three squares, whereas four or more images will appear simply as four squares in square formation. Simple, right?

First image is a landscape – Here, one image will appear without cropping, two images will appear one on top of the other (2:1 aspect ratio), three as one image in 2:1 ratio and two directly below cropped as squares. Images here, will be cropped to the center of each. Four or more images will appear as one image (the first one of course) in 3:2 ratio and three small squares below that are cropped to the center.

Fist image is a portrait – Similarly, but in reverse ratio, one portrait image will appear without cropping. Two images will appear side-by side in 1:2 ratio. Three images will appear as one 1:2-ratio image on the left-hand side of the other two which will be cropped to the center as squares that will appear one on top of the other. Again, four or more images will appear in 2:3 ratio and the three remaining images as smaller squares cropped to the center and placed one on top of the other. Here the first image will again appear on the left-hand side of the remaining images in the series.

On the mobile version, all multi-photo stories will appear as squares, and users can simply swipe to the left to view more. the first photo in the series will now determine the orientation of all others. you can read Facebook’s update that was published with the announcement of the changes in a neat PDF that can be found here.

As you can see from the above image, a few things haven’t changed. However, Facebook now won’t give you a different format for photo albums or multi-photo uploads, which you may have confused as the same thing up till now anyway.