6: Share Photos and Videos
(EN: Repeating this notice at the head of each chapter: the specific details of this book are likely outdated, but the core concepts of social networking are likely timeless.)
Various other sites, namely Flickr and YouTube, are often used for posting photos and videos for others to see online. Wile it is possible to sue these sites and share the items by linking to them, Facebook offers its own methods for sharing directly on their site for individuals who don't have accounts on other social media sites, or who wish to keep their FB items separate from their portfolios on these other sites.
This is apparently quite popular, as the author cites statistics that indicate that more photos are shared on Facebook than on any other photo-sharing site ... and by a very wide margin: 60 billion on FB compared to 8b on PhotoBucket, 7b on Picasa, and 5b on Flickr.
(EN: No such stats are given for video sharing, and my sense is YouTube has a very wide lead, but it's entirely plausible that as the number of video-enabled devices are put in the hands of users, they may use FB as a place to post and share with greater frequency.)
Sharing Photos
The author provides overly-detailed instructions for uploading a photo to FB from your computer's hard drive. The process is fairly intuitive. There are no limits on size, through FB suggests a max of 720 x 720 pixels and 15 MB in file size. There is also no indication of whether the photo will be uploaded at its original size/resolution or if FB will downscale it automatically.
It's also suggested that a feature to send an image by e-mail appears during the loading process (EN: I sought corroboration, having never seen this, and apparently it was available, then disabled, then re-enabled it, so there's really no telling what the current status is.)
With certain hardware/software, it is also possible to take photos directly from a Web camera, built into or cabled to your computer, and FB provides some basic editing tools to retouch it. Once it is loaded, however, the editing capabilities are restricted to simply rotating the image.
You may add comments to a photo, tag it (described in a previous chapter), specify the location where the photo was taken, and set options to determine who may see it.
Albums on Facebook are limited to 200 photos each - the album can be given a name, one of the photos selected as the "cover" photo for the album, and you can edit the order in which they appear.
There are a few albums that FB creates automatically: wall photos, mobile uploads, and profile pictures, to which you cannot upload photos, but add them by methods that should be self-evident from their names.
When you upload a new image, an announcement is made on your wall and in the news feed, but you can also send a specific photo in a private message or share a photo or album on your wall at any time after it has been uploaded.
The author notes that sharing does not change privacy settings: if you choose to share a photo on your wall and have previously restricted access, only people who have access will see the photo on your wall.
Facebook has also recently provided the ability to share photos with people outside of FB: for each photo and album, FB provides a "public link" that provides access. Privacy settings do not prevent anyone who has the link from viewing a photo.
Photo tagging was mentioned in the last chapter, but is repeated here. You can tag your own photos, just as you can tag any photos, but for photos you own, you can remove or edit your own tags. No indication if you can remove tags others may have added. However, it's noted that a given photo has a limit of 50 tags - not indicated whether that's total for all tags from all users, or just from each user.
The most prominent photo associated to you on FB is your profile picture You may alter or replace your profile photo at any time, and previous profile photos remain stored in the profile pictures album. Any image in your album can be used to replace your current profile picture.
Sharing Videos
The most common method of sharing a video on FB is to link to it on YouTube, but FB has implemented its own system for loading and storing videos.
The author provides a laundty list of video formats supported by FB - it's rather extensive.
As with photos, a video file can be uploaded from your hard drive, and permits videos up to about 20 minutes long, or 1 GB in total file size, or recorded directly using a webcam.
Comments and tags can be added to the video, though tags are not specific to any part of the video, just a list of names associated to the file.
Once uploaded, a video can be sent as a message attachment or shared.
(EN: THE author's notes seem a bit scant to me, and as I have no experience uploading video, I can't augment them.)