WhatsApp will now allow users to send photos in “best quality.”
It’s no secret that everyone loves using social media to share photos and videos, including on WhatsApp. Now, a new feature seen in the latest WhatsApp beta shows that the messaging app is getting an option to share media in “Best Quality”.
WhatsApp to Add a “Best Quality” Media Sharing Option
As first spotted by WABetaInfo, the latest WhatsApp Android beta (version 2.21.14.16) includes a new option to share media in “Best quality”. This option would allow users to send photos and videos in a higher quality than WhatsApp’s standard option.
In the WhatsApp beta, we can see that a new Photo upload quality option is presented in the Storage and data page. Users can choose between sending images in Auto, Best quality, and Data Saver. There’s also an identical option for videos.
It’s unclear if the “Best quality” option will leave images entirely uncompressed, or just less compressed through a lossless method. Currently, WhatsApp uses a lossy compression method, which means some quality is lost in the compression.
You can’t help but notice the striking similarity to the image quality naming in Google Photos. Google’s photo storage platform also uses the term “Best quality” for storing higher quality images.
As with any app beta, bear in mind that the features might not come to a final WhatsApp release. This particular seems very likely to be rolled out in an alpha update, but WhatsApp could change its mind at any time. There’s also no indication as to when the feature would be rolled out to all users.
Will I Notice the Difference With WhatsApp’s New Option?
Currently, WhatsApp’s compression shrinks images down to around 2MB. The average original image shot in a mobile device can be around 3MB. This doesn’t sound like much, and the average user probably won’t notice much of a difference–especially on mobile phone photos.
The real difference comes in the dedicated high-quality image files.
