The internet story of the now is how Facebook photo ruined Christmas, which reminded me of a time when I thought Facebook had ruined my photos. One day I noticed (actually, more like a gradual realization) that photos on Facebook looked strange. They were blotchy, with messed up colors. I figured that this was an artifact of recompressing uploads, but a rather annoying one, since it turned people into greenish purple skinned aliens. Turns out this had nothing to do with Facebook, but rather with Firefox. I just didn’t realize what was up because most of the photos I look at are on Facebook and pictures elsewhere didn’t seem affected (only partly true; some other sites were pretty bad too, but many were ok), and then when I compared with my phone, I figured maybe they were different sizes and compressed differently. Doesn’t help that with all the Hipstamatic and Instagram crap filtered photos it’s hard to know what colors are supposed to be in the image.

Finally, I decided the problem had to be in Firefox, and a little searching later led me to a blog post explaining how Firefox uses color management. Read it for details. I’m not particularly concerned about accurate colors, just so long as people look like people, so I disabled color management entirely. Now pictures in Firefox have the same slightly blue shifted look they do in all my other programs.