TL;DR uploading a large number (several hundred) of high quality photos to Facebook is problematic. I would recommend against it but like most people most of my friends are on Facebook so this is the most convenient platform for them to view and comment.
I have recently been uploading our wedding photos to Facebook and it is a horrible experience so am documenting this for future me, and anyone else who might face the same issues.
Firstly, note that I could not find a way to actually upload full resolution photos to Facebook on desktop. The process described below is just a way to get the photos onto Facebook with minimal effort. The web based Facebook uploader does not upload the original files, it seems to resize the photos in-browser prior to upload.
This post is applicable if:
- You have a large number of photos to upload into an album; and/or
- Your photos are high quality (10-20MB photos); and/or
- You intend to upload using a desktop browser, on Windows; and/or
- Ordering of the photos is important to you
Preparation:
- If your photos do not have correct date/time taken you probably want to name your photos so they're in the right order when sorted by filename.
- Using a separate Explorer window, split your photos into <1GB batches
On point 1, this is a particular problem with wedding photos as your photographers are likely using multiple cameras and in my experience the camera times are often out of sync.
Point 2 is extremely important. Anecdotally, if you try to upload a batch of photos >1GB in size, Chrome will likely crash, and Firefox will prepare the upload but the Post button will be disabled.
This tends to be a problem with high quality photos such as wedding photos where it's common to have 10-20MB photos.
I think what is happening behind the scenes is that Facebook is resizing the photos in Javascript, in-browser, and hits some bug/browser issue when the batch size is too large. I wasted many hours trying to figure out why Chrome kept crashing and only through a process of trial and error found that <1GB works. This is on a Windows 10 system with 32GB of RAM so no RAM pressure, hence it's likely a JS/browser issue.
If order of the photos is important to you:
- Adding Contributors will result in the uploaded photos sorting by date taken. You can not change this, despite what the dropdown says. You will have to re-order the photos manually after the upload is complete. This is extremely tedious with a large album due to the limited drag & drop interface provided.
- If you don't add Contributors, the default is "drag and drop" order which is the order you see in the upload screen.
Upload process:
- Create an album as normal
- When choosing photos to upload, use the "Upload Photos or Videos" button, don't drag and drop photos into the Facebook tab. In the Explorer window that appears, select the LAST photo first, then Shift-Click the FIRST photo.
This results in Explorer feeding the photos to Facebook in the right order. If you try to naively select First -> Last, you will find that the Last photo gets chucked first into the queue, followed by photos 1 to (Last-1).
Bonus bug: the Android app will not let you comment or tag photos #128 and beyond within an album if you tap straight into the photo from the album view. However if you enter on photo 128 and swipe to get to photo 129 and above, you will have those options. This was reported to Facebook on 16 November but so far no resolution.
