WhatsApp will soon finally handle images shared as documents better
If you’ve been using WhatsApp long enough, you’ll likely remember when sending links was a pain — very short previews, no thumbnails, etc. After a long while, the Meta-owned social platform finally took a page out of Telegram’s book, rolling out anupdate for better image previews for links. And now, it’s releasing a similar feature for document previews.
The latest news comes courtesy of the folks atWABetaInfo. According to them, WhatsApp will introduce an update to generate a proper preview when images and videos are shared as documents. The feature is currently live onWhatsApp beta version 2.22.5.11and should be rolling out to everyone in the coming weeks.
This update is far from trivial — those who send many images on the platform can testify. WhatsApp is known to reduce image quality in the course of transmitting them. The appintroduced an option that’s supposed to maintain image quality, but it hardly does that. The size difference between the data saving compression and the higher quality one is minimal.
As such,the only true way to retain an image’s original quality on WhatsAppis to send it as a document. But even that has its downsides. One of them is that the recipient currently cannot tell what the doc contains without opening it. They only get to see a muddled file name and extension. However, this aforementioned update will introduce those much-needed previews when it arrives, just like those that have beenavailable for PDF documents since at least 2016.
One can only hope that Meta fixes remaining issues with media sharing, like one that prevents image documents from showing up in the media grid when browsing the gallery and another that prevents users from sending images backed up to Google Photos (but no longer on the device storage) as documents. Better still, the company could improve regular image sharing, adding a proper option that maintains the actual quality of a media file. Until it does this, WhatsApp will continue to play second fiddle to big-time rival Telegram in the media department.
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