Facebook Photos Now Load Faster Due To Progressive JPEG Adoption

[PhilSynowiec]

If you've recently noticed Facebook photos loading up faster on your iPhone and iPad, that's because Facebook recently adopted the Progressive JPEG image format.

Progressive JPEG, or PJPEG, is a format which stores several copies of a photo with different levels of image quality. Meaning that as Facebook is loading a photo, the lowest quality scan will appear first, then slowly load with more and more quality, similar to buffering a YouTube video.

Facebook listed the following reasons for switching to PJPEG:

• Data consumption: PJPEG allows us to skip downloading smaller versions of an image.
• Network connections: Since we don't download smaller versions of an image anymore, we now use only one connection per image instead of many.
• Disk storage: Storing fewer photos on disk decreases the amount of disk space used by the app.
• One URL: Since we no longer need to download multiple images at different sizes, we can simply use one URL.

Photos for all Facebook users should now be loading up around 15% the before. The Facebook app can be found in the App Store for free.