WhatsApp might be the most popular chat app in the world, but it hasn’t always been the best for sending photos and videos. The app traditionally had a 16MB limit on any media you sent, and, even still, compressed it to save space. That compression resulted in lower-quality images and videos, which is frustrating at a time when smartphones have incredible cameras.
Luckily for those of us on WhatsApp, things are about to get a lot less blurry. Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that WhatsApp now supports high-quality photo-sharing—although you may miss the option if you aren’t looking for it, and the new settings still don’t apply to videos.
How to send WhatsApp images in high quality
Now, when you attempt to share a photo in WhatsApp, you might see a new button, located next to the crop tool, that allows you to choose whether to send the photo in “standard quality” or “HD quality.” The former applies the same compression WhatsApp has used on images for years, and which noticeably reduces the quality when you’re sharing larger photos. The new “HD quality” option allows you to share your photos with more detail, closer to what you’d expect sharing a photo in an app like Apple’s Messages.
While this feature is only now officially rolling out to WhatsApp users, it isn’t exactly new to those of us keeping tabs on the app’s in-the-works features. WhatsApp has been testing the ability to send high-quality images in chats since as far back as June: The company dropped the feature in beta version 23.11.0.76 on iOS, and 2.23.12.13 on Android.
Unfortunately, this new feature is still not perfect. WhatsApp still applies some compression to photos sent via the HD Quality setting, so even now, you won’t be able to send HD photos in their native resolution. But they’ll look much better than they did before.
In addition, the option only appears for images large enough to justify HD quality in the first place. If WhatsApp doesn’t think the photo is big enough, you’ll only be able to send it in SD. The feature also only applies to photos, so you won’t be able to send videos in higher quality this way.
How to send high quality videos on WhatsApp
While WhatsApp’s new high-quality option may only apply to photos, there is a way to send high-quality videos—as well as high-quality files of any kind—in WhatsApp chats. Rather than send your videos as videos, you can send them as documents. WhatsApp has a 100MB limit on documents, and apparently, anything can be a “document.”
To send a video file via this method, open a WhatsApp conversation, tap the attachment icon (Android) or the (+) (iOS), choose “Document,” and then choose the files you want to share. WhatsApp will send the files without compression, so you can share your content in its full quality (as long as it’s under 100MB). Since videos these days tend to add up the megabytes fast, you might need to limit this method to shorter videos. To preserve the quality of longer videos and larger files, you’ll need to use another sharing method, like Dropbox or Google Drive.
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