Image compression is both an angel and a devil.
On one side, in the world where smartphones are equipped with increasingly powerful cameras, images can be massive in size. Thanks to image compression, it allows those images to be sent across the world in an instant. But on the other side, image compression will lower the quality of images.
WhatsApp, the most popular instant messaging app in terms of number of users, rely on image compression to make experience of sending images a jiffy.
But resorting to compressing images make images look bad, and WhatsApp knows this very well.
Because of this, the messaging app is stepping a bit further by introducing support for high-resolution image sharing.
The feature is first introduced by Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in a post:
In the modern days of internet, smartphones get better, and also the internet itself, which gets speedier. With screens that provide higher and higher resolution, it's getting easier to see flaws in compressed images due to their compromised size, resolution and quality.
On the media-first platform, like Instagram, which is also owned by Meta, image compression is generally frowned upon.
But on WhatsApp, people expect things to be instantaneous, and WhatsApp has been providing that experience from the very beginning.
However, since WhatsApp started enticing users to create communities, copying rivals like Telegram, WhatsApp also resorts to increase file limits for uploads, allowing users to send completely uncompressed images and videos.
The thing is doing so means that users should attach them as documents instead of media.
In ordinary chats, where chats are usually made, users want a speedy experience, but a better image quality.
So HD image sharing here, is the ideal ground between the default compression and documents-type attachment that can be too massive.
Whereas the standard quality resize everything to a regular 1600 x 1052 resolution, HD supports images up to 4096 x 2692.
So indeed, this is a massive bump in quality.
In other words, with HD resolution, users can send images in higher quality than before, but without having too much degradation in quality.
Although WhatsApp did not officially say how much compression takes place in the HD photo option, it is far lower than the standard mode.
High-resolution images sent on WhatsApp will have an HD icon appended to the lower left corner of the images' preview, indicating that the images are in HD.
While the standard compressed quality is still the default, given that WhatsApp users care more about chatting that good-looking images, users can switch to HD using the corresponding button at the top alongside other image editing tools in WhatsApp.
Just before this, WhatsApp introduced a screen-sharing feature for video calls.