You can finally send high-resolution photos on Facebook Messenger

It’s time for another update for one of the Facebook’s owned apps. This time, the Facebook Messenger is in luck. Today, the company has finally enabled a feature which a lot of people, including me, were waiting for. It finally allows you to send photos in higher resolution, up to 4K.

You might have noticed that until now, when you send a photo to someone via Facebook Messenger its quality gets lower and its size gets smaller. It also removes all the properties of the photos including the capture date, ISO, and camera name. Same is the case with WhatsApp and some other sharing services as well. Sharing services take this step to reduce the internet usage and make the sharing quicker as a smaller image will upload sooner than a larger image. But it also makes sharing annoying for some users when they want to send an original image to someone with its original properties and then they find another way to send it like email and Dropbox sharing.

But all of it is changing from today as you can now send photos on Facebook Messenger up to 4,096 x 4,096 resolution. Facebook also said that people send more than 17 billion pictures a month on Messenger and the new feature is going to benefit all those users. Facebook also said that it the photos will still be sent as quickly as they were sent before. So Facebook might have introduced a new algorithm to reduce the file size or something like that.

To be able to send the photos in 4K, you need to update your app from Google Play Store or App Store and then share the image normally by tapping the camera icon.

Facebook also posted some sample photos to show how the new resolution will affect the photo sharing quality. The right sides of the photos are in 4K resolution while the left sides are the old resolution.

WhatsApp also shrinks original images and reduces their quality to make sharing quicker. Now as Facebook has introduced high-resolution image sharing in Messenger, it might soon add the same ability to WhatsApp as well.