WhatsApp HD Photos feature starts rolling out to Android smartphone users

Through WhatsApp HD Photos users can look forward to a much better experience.

This WhatsApp feature will be quite welcome for all who want to send and receive good quality photos. (HT_PRINT)

WhatsApp looks to have automated the delivery of new features to its users. Almost on a daily basis you hear about yet another feature that WhatsApp is rolling out and if not rolling out, it is very much testing some new update or the other. And it is all happening very much in the public's eye. The more people know about it the better WhatsApp likes it. Well, WhatsApp users like it too, considering the benefits that they derive from it as well as the rising number of subscribers. A latest report now details yet another feature that the company has started rolling out to its beta users, called WhatsApp HD Photos.

According to a report by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp has started rolling out a new feature called HD Photos to the users of its Android beta app. This new feature is available as a part of WhatsApp Beta for Android version 2.21.15.5.

So, what does WhatsApp's HD Photos do? The blog site says that this new feature enables WhatsApp users to choose the quality of the photo that they want to share with their friends and family. Users will get three settings to pick from. This includes Auto, wherein WhatsApp will automatically decide the right algorithm to compress the image. The second option is the data saver option, where the company will compress the image in a way that it takes the least amount of data. In this case, the quality of the image will be reduced drastically. The third option is the Best Quality option. This setting enables users to send high quality or HD images. It uses the maximum amount of data and maintains the quality of the shared image.

The blog site says that WhatsApp does compress the image when users pick the best quality option. However, that compression is very mild. The company keeps about 80% of the original quality. If the image is bigger than 2048×2048, it might be resized. “The old configuration allowed to keep about 70% of the quality, but large photos were always resized,” it wrote in a blog post.

That said, this WhatsApp feature is still in the testing phase and so it is possible that beta testers may encounter some bugs while using this feature in the app. It also means that users of WhatsApp's main app will have to wait a little longer to get their hands on this feature.