Instant messaging services, WhatsApp of course among them, have been around for quite some time. a tool commonly used to share files with our contacts. The convenience and immediacy they provide, especially since their web versions and desktop clients have proliferated, make it the most practical solution for one-off transfers, especially of small files.

Now, although this is practical for any type of file, it will undoubtedly be The most common and understandable use is the transfer of photos and videos which were actually the first file types that could be transferred between users via many instant messaging services. The ability of smartphone cameras to generate this type of content is of course the main reason.

Now, although videos and photos are the most common file types in this type of operation, Paradoxically, they were also always treated the worst.. And if you send a PDF (for example) via WhatsApp, the recipient will receive a copy identical to yours, but if you send a photo or video, they will be compressed beforehand, resulting in a loss of quality. And yes, it’s true that there was an improvement in this regard last August with the addition of high definition support for both photos and a few days later for videos. An improvement yes, but still with a loss of quality.

However, and as we can read in The Verge, it will change, and it is WhatsApp for iOS now allows you to transfer images and videos without loss, something it uses the feature I mentioned earlier to transfer them as a file instead of as an editable image or video. As we can read in this publication, this new feature is already active, but it is being deployed gradually, so it is possible that some users will still need some time (weeks) to be able to use it.

In the picture above you can see how the user has submitted both types of content (video in MOV format and image in HEIC format), but unlike what is common, they do not appear as such in the WhatsApp client, but with the same appearance that any other file type would have. However, it is clear that once downloaded to a smartphone, they can be viewed on the device.

This deployment started on iOS, but the same feature was also seen a few months ago, in the beta version of WhatsApp for Androidso we can hope that it won’t take long to reach these users.