Low photo quality: Whatsapp wants to eliminate a major weakness

Original image quality
Whatsapp wants to eliminate one of its biggest weaknesses – and is already working on the update

Especially on large screens, it quickly becomes apparent how bad the photo quality on Whatsapp actually is. That should change.

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Pictures sent via Whatsapp are often of surprisingly poor quality. This is intended to save storage space on the recipient’s device. But soon, Whatsapp will no longer calculate small photos on request.

Whatsapp has always been unsuitable as a shipping option for beautiful pictures. This is mainly due to the fact that Messenger lowers the quality of media for reasons of space. For a long time, this was also a sensible decision by the developers, because storage space was a scarce commodity on users’ smartphones for years. Especially with older iPhones, which only offered 64 gigabytes in the basic configuration.

In the meantime, however, the situation has eased and 128 gigabytes are the new standard. Theoretically, this would also allow more images with better quality without the devices reaching their limits.

Whatsapp allows to send pictures in original quality

How “WABetaInfo” reported, Whatsapp finally seems to be addressing one of the messenger’s biggest weaknesses and to completely disable the strong compression of the images if desired. This emerges from a report on the messenger’s current Android beta.

In the test version, the experts found a previously unknown button when sending new messages. An options menu can be used there to determine whether you want to send an image in its original quality or in the usual smaller format.

Almost two years ago, Whatsapp created the first ways for users to increase the quality of sent images. On iOS, this option can be found in the settings. Navigate to the “Storage and Data” menu and then click on “Media Upload Quality”. The three options “Automatic”, “Best quality” and “Save data” are available there. What’s missing is a zero-touch delivery, known as “actual size” at Apple.

Large images only make sense in exceptional cases

With a look at the memory consumption, however, you should not use this by default for every image, no matter how unimportant, as soon as Whatsapp lifts the restriction. For comparison: Five conventional images from a current iPhone are around 12 megabytes in size without compression. Without any restrictions visible on mobile devices, but with a good portion of digital post-processing, it is only 4 megabytes.

In a messenger like Whatsapp, where hundreds of pictures quickly end up on the phone, especially in larger groups, this adds up enormously. The option of sending images in their original quality is therefore particularly worthwhile for motifs with which the recipient wants to do more than just take a quick look at them – for example print a poster.

As with every innovation in a Whatsapp beta, it is unclear when the operators will implement the changes there for the masses and they will become part of the normal Messenger versions.

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