Have you ever received a photo from a friend on a messaging app and thought, “Man, Patrick’s phone sucks”? It turns out it might not be their phone at all—many messaging apps lower image quality on purpose. Let me explain why, and if you stick around, I’ll show you how to fix it.
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Why messaging apps lower image quality
The reason messaging apps reduce image quality is surprisingly straightforward.
Serving images over the internet might be free for you, but it isn’t for the company that runs the service. Those images have to be stored somewhere—and that somewhere is the company’s servers.
Now, even though Meta has hundreds of petabytes of available storage, that’s plenty of space for storing all the cat photos you send to your friends on Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
But Meta isn’t foolish.
Why would it waste all that storage space to preserve the sharpness and quality of your cat’s zoomed-in fur, when there’s an easy way to keep the image at a fraction of the cost?
You see, a typical image from your phone can easily take up a couple of megabytes of storage (or more) depending on things like megapixel count, scene details, noise, HDR, and so on.
To save on storage and bandwidth, Meta takes your original image and first reduces the resolution. For example, my 2592×4608 photo became 1152×2048 after sending it on Messenger, which is a 2.25x reduction.
Next, the image is run through an aggressive compression algorithm. The algorithm removes and reorganizes information (usually in places you’re less likely to notice, like the sky).
This cuts the file size dramatically, but it also lowers image quality and sharpness, which becomes especially apparent when you try zooming in. That’s why it’s almost impossible to read text documents that were sent through messaging apps.
I’ll show you a few examples, but keep in mind that photos on our site (and most sites) are compressed too. So you might not notice the difference here, but trust me, it’s there.
Here’s my original 2592×4608 photo (2.3 MB).
Here’s the same image after running it through Messenger.
This is the image after sending and downloading it on WhatsApp.
And this is the image sent and downloaded through Instagram DMs.
Images aren’t the only thing that gets compressed, though.
Since videos consist of a ton of images (called frames), they get hit especially hard. Every platform, from YouTube and Instagram to TikTok, runs some sort of compression algorithm, but messaging apps tend to be even more aggressive when compressing videos.
Most of the videos I send via messaging apps are borderline unwatchable, and you’ve likely noticed it too. Fortunately, the following method works with videos as well.
PSA: Google Photos is lowering the quality of your memories
Make sure you understand how that storage space is used.
How to keep the original quality in messaging apps
If you’d like to keep the full, original quality of your images (and videos) in messaging apps, there are a couple of solutions you can try. First, if the app supports attaching files, use the “Attach” function instead of scrolling through the gallery to send the image. However, not all apps support this, and some might compress the image anyway.
To work around that, you can try compressing the image into a RAR or ZIP file before sending. Keep in mind that not all apps allow large files, regardless of how you package them.
I didn’t manage to send a full-resolution image on Messenger, no matter how hard I tried.
Fortunately, WhatsApp allowed me to send the image as a RAR file, presumably because the app downloads attachments to the recipient’s phone before they can open them. In that case, the files aren’t actually stored in the app itself.
The second way to preserve the original image quality involves uploading the image to a cloud service—one that will treat it as a file or won’t compress the image. I used Google Drive in my example, but any equivalent service will work.
I headed into my gallery, hit the “Share” button, and selected “(Google) Drive.” Next, I created a new folder and uploaded my image to it.
Next, we need to head over to Google Drive and ensure the folder can be accessed by other people.
If you know the person’s email address, you can add them here—but this is an article about sending images via messaging apps, so let’s keep things on topic.
To create a link that can be viewed by your friends and relatives, press the three-dot menu on the right of the folder and go to “Manage Access.” Under “Restricted,” select “Change.” Tap on “Restricted” again, then select “Anyone with the link.”
You can now press the “Copy Link” icon in the top-right corner and paste it into the messaging app of your choice.
You can use this folder to share future photos as well. If you want to allow people to download the images, change the access level from “Viewer” to “Editor” in the “General Access” menu.
Just keep in mind that images you store on Google Drive will slowly accumulate and take up space, so if you don’t have a Google One storage plan, remember to occasionally clean out the folder.
But what if you want to preserve the image quality without all this extra work?
In that case, you can try enabling high-resolution photos in the messaging app’s settings (on Facebook Messenger, there’s an “HD” button you can tap in the corner of the gallery).
Depending on the app, the image might still be slightly compressed, but it will preserve more of the original quality.
For example, switching to HD upload quality in WhatsApp preserved the original resolution, though it still reduced the file size to about a fifth of its original size. Even so, the image quality is noticeably better.
If you have a lot of important images to send—say, from a wedding or honeymoon—you should upload them to a cloud storage or file-sharing service and share the link.
However, if you just want a convenient way to improve image quality without extra steps, enabling HD photos should be more than enough to ensure your compressed images are close to the original quality.
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