The latest WhatsApp update includes a highly anticipated feature: sharing photos and videos in original quality. Now you can send and receive images in very high definition… with some limitations.
In addition to text or voice messages, WhatsApp allows you to easily exchange photos and videos. However, for a long time, messaging heavily compressed images to speed up data transfer, which significantly lowered their quality. Aware of this limitation, and the disappointment it caused among users, Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, has worked a lot on the issue recently. Last August, it offered a first significant step forward by introducing the transfer of photos and videos in HD. “Sharing images on WhatsApp just got an upgrade – you can now send them in HD”indicated Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the group, on on his Facebook account. An appreciable step forward, but not ideal. Because photos and videos were limited to high definition (720p), and still compressed. And it is this limit that the app has just broken by allowing its users to send photos and videos in their original quality. Or almost.
WhatsApp photos and videos: transfer in original quality (or almost)
In its latest update (version 23.24.79 on iOS and 2.23.24.82 on Android), the app has a new function in the document sharing menu which allows you to search for content directly in the gallery photo. Thanks to this option, you can exchange photos and videos in very high quality. Provided that they are less than 2 GB. Indeed, compression will be carried out if one of the files is greater than this size.
To send a photo or video in high quality and without compression, the procedure is very simple, and similar on Android and iOS. Open the conversation in which you want to send a photo or video. Then press the + button (on iPhone) or on The trombone (on Android) to the left of the text entry bar. Then press Document in the pane that appears, then click Select a photo or video (on iOS) or on Select from gallery (on Android).
Your image gallery opens: then select the photo or video you want to send, add a caption or not and validate the sending. That’s all !
However, while this new option should obviously delight users who wanted to share their most beautiful photos and videos, it presents a small constraint. In fact, very high quality images are not directly visible in thumbnail in the conversation. And you have to open them to look at them. Nothing particularly annoying in practice, but it’s better to know!