WhatsApp is hands down the most popular instant messaging service in many parts of the world. But, let's be honest, it's not perfect. One of its flaws is that it compresses the heck out of any media you share. Even though they recently added the ability to share HD images and videos, the quality is still nowhere near what the best smartphone cameras can capture. Luckily, we've got some good news: Meta (the company that owns WhatsApp) is working on a way for us to share images and videos on WhatsApp without losing any of their original quality.
Now, WhatsApp isn't exactly all about media like Instagram, but this compression problem messes up our images and videos, making them look way worse than they should. Even when you use the new HD video sharing option, it still downgrades 4K videos to 720p, which ends up looking blurry on decent phones and even worse on bigger screens like tablets.
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Thankfully, the folks over at WABetaInfo have given us a sneak peek at a feature in the works. This feature would let us share images and videos on WhatsApp without any compression. In a screenshot taken from beta version 2.23.18.12 of the Android app, we see a new option: "Choose from gallery," which seems to be under the Attach (paperclip icon) → Documents section. While they could have just added an "Uncompressed" choice when sharing HD images, putting it under documents seems to make sense too.
Here's the catch: these shared files would be treated as documents, not regular images. The big deal is that, right now, you can actually attach image files as documents to avoid compression, but you have to use the clunky Android file picker instead of WhatsApp's usual image attachment tool. With proper support for sharing full-resolution images, hopefully, we'll be directed to WhatsApp's regular image and video picker.
Keep in mind that this whole uncompressed media sharing thing is still a work in progress and not available to beta testers just yet. So, we don't know exactly when it will be out. However, it's really great to see the people at Meta listening to user requests and working on these much-needed improvements. In the meantime, if you want to share media files without compression, you can still do it by attaching them as documents. Good thing WhatsApp now lets you share files as big as 2GB. The only downside is that you have to deal with the not-so-user-friendly Android file picker.