Image: © Miquel/Stock.adobe.com
Those ‘good morning’ photos from your aunt are set to get a big touch up as Mark Zuckerberg says WhatsApp is finally getting a HD upgrade.
Remember the last time someone took a nice photo of you, but when they sent it to you on WhatsApp the image quality took a serious hit? Pixelated images will soon be a thing of the past as Meta brings HD to its popular messaging app.
In a Facebook post yesterday (17 August), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said WhatsApp has been upgraded to allow sharing photos in HD quality. According to a screen recording of the feature, users will have to option to choose between the standard quality and HD when they send a photo through the app.
Photos shared in high quality will have a HD sticker at the bottom left of the image in the chat, according to the quick video shared by Zuckerberg. By clicking on that sticker, users can change the quality as they wish.
According to Zuckerberg’s video, standard quality is shown as 1365 x 2048 in resolution while HD is 2000 x 3000. Users first spotted the option available through the Android beta version of WhatsApp and the TestFlight app on iOS, indicating that a public launch was on its way.
While the HD feature is rolling out to global users over the next few weeks, reports suggest that Meta is also planning to allow HD videos on WhatsApp.
Meta’s family of apps – including WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and now Threads – have collectively seen growth in users. In its latest earnings call, Meta said that its combined apps had 3.88bn monthly active users in the latest quarter, an increase of 6pc.
The company’s revenue for its second fiscal quarter of 2023 was just shy of $32bn, an increase of 11pc compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile, Facebook managed to hit a new milestone in this quarter, surpassing 3bn monthly active users for the first time.
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