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Does iMessage not compress photos?

S

Siderz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 10, 2012
991
6
I took a picture of my friend from my iPhone 5s and sent it to her, out of the blue I decided to see if it compresses, so I used iMessage on my iMac and just dragged the photo to the desktop to see the size, noticed it was 2MB! Then I saved the image from my iPhone messages to the camera roll and transferred it to my iMac, and it was still 2MB!

That's ridiculous! And you can't see how much storage iMessage is using on iCloud so no wonder I'm using so much.

There needs to be an option to send photos as compressed or uncompressed, or always compressed and a method of sending as uncompressed would be AirDrop. Apps like Telegram compress them by quite a bit, that 2MB photo will be made smaller and compressed to probably a size of <200KB. You can send them as uncompressed as well by clicking "Document".

I feel there is very little need to send pictures as uncompressed, or if they are being compressed, to send them at sizes as big as 2MB, what is the receiver going to do with them? Print them? Probably not. Probably going to upload them to Facebook...which is just going to compress them anyway.
 
P

pmontanarella

macrumors 6502
Oct 12, 2012
321
7
Vancouver, Canada
Siderz said:
I took a picture of my friend from my iPhone 5s and sent it to her, out of the blue I decided to see if it compresses, so I used iMessage on my iMac and just dragged the photo to the desktop to see the size, noticed it was 2MB! Then I saved the image from my iPhone messages to the camera roll and transferred it to my iMac, and it was still 2MB!

That's ridiculous! And you can't see how much storage iMessage is using on iCloud so no wonder I'm using so much.

There needs to be an option to send photos as compressed or uncompressed, or always compressed and a method of sending as uncompressed would be AirDrop. Apps like Telegram compress them by quite a bit, that 2MB photo will be made smaller and compressed to probably a size of <200KB. You can send them as uncompressed as well by clicking "Document".

I feel there is very little need to send pictures as uncompressed, or if they are being compressed, to send them at sizes as big as 2MB, what is the receiver going to do with them? Print them? Probably not. Probably going to upload them to Facebook...which is just going to compress them anyway.
Click to expand...

Would definitely also help speed up the process of sending media through iMessage which I've noticed is often painstakingly slow!
 
S

Siderz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 10, 2012
991
6
I just sent a 12 second video to my friend then checked how big it is.

1080p, 25MB!!! What the hell!! Telegram compressed this down to 5MB! Granted, 640x360, but that's good enough for a tiny screen!
 
A

Adamsappel

macrumors regular
Mar 12, 2014
117
0
This is where BBM for iOS or Whatsapp come in handy. BBM is also more secure andvworks well for me on my iPhone. It automatically resizes a 2MB photo to maybe 64kb
 
BenTrovato

BenTrovato

macrumors 68040
Jun 29, 2012
3,035
2,198
Canada
Adamsappel said:
This is where BBM for iOS or Whatsapp come in handy. BBM is also more secure andvworks well for me on my iPhone. It automatically resizes a 2MB photo to maybe 64kb
Click to expand...

I like how whatsapp does it better. I find the quality in BBM photos just a little sub par. On the other hand though, I've been using BBM for over 6 months and it's not hogging up very much space for attachments so that's nice :D
 
A

Adamsappel

macrumors regular
Mar 12, 2014
117
0
Whatsapp surely does it better and its performance is exemplary. I have also used WeChat but removed it as it has sevurity issues. Whatsapp also has vulnerabilities but that should not worry the average user at all.

Yes, the BBM picture quality is on deficit.
 
S

Siderz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 10, 2012
991
6
I prefer how you can do it on Telegram.

You either click "Choose photo" and send it compressed, or you click "Document", and then can pick a photo to be sent uncompressed. If you send as a document, it won't automatically download so you're not gonna waste people's storage/data cap on uncompressed photos.
 
G

Gus320

macrumors newbie
Feb 27, 2015
1
0
'Mini Pxt' App solves this problem

Mini Pxt was built for exactly this. It resizes and compresses up to 10 pics at a time and puts them in an iMessage ready to send.

I wrote it so I didn't use up so much data on my capped plan - or use up data on my friends' plans. Give it a try! https://itunes.apple.com/app/mini-pxt/id878540590?mt=8&uo=4 That's the (cheap!) full version. If that link doesn't get you there, just search for 'Mini Pxt' in the App Store :)

There's a free trial out there too, but without the ability to customise, or send more than one photo at a time.
 
K

Kevin L.

macrumors member
Jan 17, 2008
72
0
Gus320 said:
'Mini Pxt' App solves this problem

Mini Pxt was built for exactly this. It resizes and compresses up to 10 pics at a time and puts them in an iMessage ready to send.

You're a genius, Gus320!!! I always assumed iMessage was compressing my photos, but I recently realized it's burning through my small 200mb data plan. Thanks!
Click to expand...
 
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