We recently saw that WhatsApp is working to introduce a long-awaited change, which will introduce the ability to share photos and images at the highest quality (or almost) in the future. It all started in the beta channel and there are no signs of a public release yet, but the latest update introduces some new features worth sharing.
The suspect version is 2.23.4.70 on iOS and among the changes it turns out that WhatsApp will introduce a new button that will allow you to change the compression, introducing the fateful “HD quality”. Here is a screenshot of the change.
In fact, it is the first iOS beta that shows the work in progress on the photo quality options, which until today we had only identified on Android and in the desktop version. As anticipated above and confirmed by the screenshot, WhatsApp plans to introduce a new HD button within the editor header. The novelty will allow us to share an image with better quality (but not the same as the original) choosing the “HD quality” option.
At the moment it appears that the default option will always be ‘Standard Quality’ and for now you should select the HD option whenever you want to take advantage of the new feature. It was originally thought that WhatsApp would strip away all compression with HD quality, however the site WABetaInfo analyzed the code and found that actually we will not be able to exceed 90% original quality, therefore some compression will still be present. The only thing that will remain the same will be the size of the current image or photo.
WhatsApp reminds that the beta version has important bugs and some users may experience a crash when playing videos within chats and status, so you should take these aspects into consideration before updating. The ability to manage photo quality is under development and will be released in a future update of the public application, but apparently the operation will not be so immediate.
