WhatsApp is finally ready to leave low-res media sharing in the past

WhatsApp has been one of our favorite encrypted messaging apps on Android for many years now, and its popularity is testament to Meta’s constant improvements which keep the app relevant. Given the scale of operations, media compression in chats was a necessary evil. Meta developers gave everyone a convenient workaround a few months ago, with support for HD image sharing. Now, the option to set HD quality as the new default is rolling out widely.

WhatsApp’s standard compression can be aggressive, robbing photos and videos of their clarity. For years, we depended on workarounds such as attaching the media as a document to bypass compression, and were further encouraged when WhatsApp upped the attachment file size limits to a whopping 2GB each. Workarounds added several steps to a simple process, so we were elated to spot an HD image sharing option in June last year. The one-tap toggle reached all users in August, and was quickly followed by support for HD video sharing as well.

Although HD doesn’t equal uncompressed, the final resolution of images and videos is better suited for modern high-resolution smartphone and tablet displays. Currently, if you enable the HD option for one image or video while sending many at once, the option is automatically applied to all the selected files.

However, if you’re like Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii, who prefers using the app mostly for sharing media with contacts, even this might not suffice. To save you even more effort, WhatsApp devs were spotted developing a new default media quality setting a few months ago.

The new default setting should roll out soon

Although the previous sighting of the high-quality media sharing default was in a beta version of the app, WhatsApp developers tend to pull the feature offline sometimes, meaning it isn’t available consistently. Now, though, Russakovskii, a few others on X, and many other beta channel users on the AP team, confirm the settings toggle is available widely in beta, specifically on version 2.24.13.10 of the app.

That’s usually a good sign that precedes a worldwide release because expanded testing usually suggests WhatsApp is confident in the feature’s implementation. You can check if you have the option, located within WhatsApp under Settings → Storage and data → Media upload quality. That said, WhatsApp cautions users that HD quality files can be up to six times larger, and consume more bandwidth and storage space on your device. The next logical steps should be support for Hd media in WhatsApp status updates, and per-chat media quality settings, but there’s no telling if and when those might come.