Please help me understand a future where social networking sites will maintain and display ~ 6200px X 6200px photos of your selfies. Outside of genetically engineering new eyeballs, I'm struggling here.

I think it's safe to assume that FB has tried to keep the original version of every photo ever uploaded. A few years ago, YouTube retroactively upgraded uploaded videos to HD. It's also safe to assume that they're going to continue upgrading/evolving/extending their most important feature, photos, and try to make it the #1 place to organize, store, and share all your photos.

Facebook then becomes an API upgrade away from exposing the original versions of uploaded photos. The photos will also come with all of your friend's faces conveniently tagged, allowing an app with the right permissions to extract high resolution faces/pupils/reflections. None of this needs to happen in the news stream.

So they may not have full resolution versions from the mobile, which is likely their primary source of pictures.

For a while, the Java upload tool was knocking down resolution before upload on desktop, too. That was a few years ago, I think. 2008-09?

I'm not saying you're wrong. But look at it this way: you are predicting that the resolution of stored photos won't increase by another power of ten. If you are right, this would be the first time in tech history that such a prediction would be correct.

Also, just a nitpick. I think relevant factor is ~100, the difference between the current resolution maintained by most websites and the proposed one for this technique to start becoming feasible.

[Ok, 20 may be right. I didn't know they allowed 2000x1000]

Personally, I will enjoy seeing high res pictures of other people on my 4k monitor when I get one.

Again, not saying I'm 100% that you're wrong, but you're making a bold and unprecedented prediction.

it would be cool to make group pictures, though.

10 years ago, I never would've guessed we'd be up to 120" TVs with 4k resolution. I was pretty happy with my 42", which was a big step up from what my parents had used before.

Right now, those examples I mentioned are new and expensive, but it won't be another 10 years before they come down in price and Sony and Samsung will be looking to sell us on another resolution.

Meanwhile, having computers hooked up to your TV is also becoming increasingly popular. My dad hates looking at a tiny computer screen, and would much rather look at photos on a TV.

So you've got high resolution TVs, and low resolution photos. That means the photos are too small or blown up to show their pixelation. That won't fly forever.

So, your limiting factor is glass, and manufacturing precision on that end is moving forward much slower than on the sensor.

[1] - http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/resolution.shtml

I wager we'll see 4k tablets under $1k within 2 years, and TVs will have to follow suit (drop in price, increase in quality).

Now imagine that lenses for single-shot panoramas are standard on all cameras and cellphones.

I used to think my 50GB disk was massive. Now I have more RAM than that, and use it all!

Photos will increase in size because of many factors, possibly including multiple focus points, or more color information, or 3d or a whole suite of yet to be thought up reasons.

I am very sure social networking sites will store larger files than 6.2k x 6.2k, with the 4K monitors and video and cameras producing larger and larger images (think medium format, even a piddly little smartphone now has 49MP!)

This saves a big resolution picture with spacial info. With your computer then you see a smaller part of the image. 6200x6200 images is not too much.

Add everything that has to do with 3D. Life is 3D, not 2D.

I can see the appeal of life-sized photos on social networking sites in the future. Group photos could benefit from being larger than that to include multiple people at life-size, but I'm unsure of how a resolution greater than 2400x3000 would be useful for a profile picture at this point.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/HeadAnthr...

[2] http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina...