Exporting for social platforms

It looked fine on your monitor and came out soft and washed out once posted. On upload the platform re-encoded it, resized it and threw the metadata away. You can't control its compression. You can control the file you hand it.

Hands-on version: A 4:5 border that does not crop your photo — the three-step flow with interface screenshots, a before/after pair and the failure cases people actually hit.

1. What the platform does on upload

Details vary, but nearly every platform does three things.

• Re-encodes your file at its own quality setting, whatever you exported at.
• Scales anything over its long-edge limit down with its own algorithm, usually with no sharpening afterwards.
• Often drops the EXIF wholesale, GPS included. Good for privacy; see what is hidden in a photo.

The exact limits change, so don't memorise them; check the official help page when you need a number. The rest is the part you control on any platform.

2. How large to export

Don't upload the full-size file. The platform's downscaler doesn't sharpen. Resize and sharpen yourself and you get a better, more predictable result.

Also: a 4:5 or 3:4 vertical fills far more of a phone screen, while a wide landscape shrinks to a strip in the feed. That often decides whether anyone stops scrolling.

3. Colour: why sRGB is not optional

Browsers and most apps read pixel values as sRGB. Edit in Adobe RGB or Display P3, export without converting or without embedding the ICC profile, and many viewers show those numbers as sRGB anyway. Colour goes flat, worst in saturated reds and greens.

So convert to sRGB on export and embed the sRGB profile. iPhone HEIC files are often Display P3, so this matters most when you turn them into JPEGs.

4. Compression and quality

• JPEG quality 80–90 (8–9 on a ten-point scale) looks like 100 at normal viewing distance, at a fraction of the size.
• Resize first, then compress. The other way round, you scale artefacts already baked in.
• Don't keep re-saving. Every JPEG save loses a little, and a dozen rounds show. Work from the original; see RAW or JPEG.
• A 20MB original won't look sharper online. It just gets compressed harder.

5. Why the settings disappear

Aperture, shutter, ISO, lens and body all live in the EXIF, a block of data stored apart from the pixels. Strip it, or transcode the file, and the settings are gone.

The only way to make them travel with the picture is to draw them into the pixels, which is what an EXIF watermark does; see adding a camera settings watermark. A settings strip carries exposure data only, never your coordinates.

How this works in Lenscript. Mark reads the EXIF and draws body, lens, aperture, shutter and ISO as a strip or border, in 50 templates, with an optional credit line, a © notice and your own logo. Pick 3:4 or 4:5 from its 11 aspect ratios and it extends the canvas rather than cropping, filling the gap with a blurred copy of the photo or plain black. GPS is always removed on export. JPEGs come out at quality 100 and full resolution with no quality setting, so resize before you drop the file in. It runs locally in the browser, uploads nothing and is free. The web version downloads one photo at a time for now while zip download is being finished, and it can't open HEIC, so convert to JPEG or PNG first.

6. A pre-export checklist

1. Finish editing, then convert to sRGB and embed the profile
2. Resize to the target long edge and sharpen for output
3. If the settings should show, add the watermark before exporting
4. Export JPEG at quality 80–90
5. Make sure no GPS or other sensitive fields remain (see photo privacy)
6. Look at it on a phone before posting. Right on a calibrated monitor isn't always right there

7. FAQ