Other Best way (quality) to share photos and videos

[ian87w]

Amongst iPhone users, what’s the best way to share photos and videos? (Eg collection of photos and videos during a trip)

At first, I thought iCloud Photo shared album is the obvious choice. But apparently photos and videos shared this way are resized, which is not good.

Another idea is to have a group iMessage and just dump the photos in the iMessage.

What do you guys think? We probably don’t want to resort to uploading files to Google drive or something as we kinda want to view the photos within the gallery/message thread instead of seeing them as files in a separate app. Any other ideas?

 

[now i see it]

If you want to share videos, really the best way is to upload them to YouTube with a private link that only guests of your choosing can view. Nobody else can see it.
Any video dropped into iMessage will get extremely compressed. It’s ok for very short clips resized down to 720p but definitely not good for longer videos.

If you just want to share one big video with a person, you can use Apple’s mail drop feature that allows you to upload huge files (up to 50 GB) to their server for an email recipient to download for a while.

For sharing photos, (and video really) iCloud photo sharing is fine. Compression isn’t bad. End users looking at your pictures aren’t going to zoom in to pixel level looking for compression artifacts…and they won’t care even if they see hints of it anyway.

 

[jcorbin]

Does air drop compress?

 

[now i see it]

No

 

[ian87w]

If you want to share videos, really the best way is to upload them to YouTube with a private link that only guests of your choosing can view. Nobody else can see it.
Any video dropped into iMessage will get extremely compressed. It’s ok for very short clips resized down to 720p but definitely not good for longer videos.

If you just want to share one big video with a person, you can use Apple’s mail drop feature that allows you to upload huge files (up to 50 GB) to their server for an email recipient to download for a while.

For sharing photos, (and video really) iCloud photo sharing is fine. Compression isn’t bad. End users looking at your pictures aren’t going to zoom in to pixel level looking for compression artifacts…and they won’t care even if they see hints of it anyway.

Whoa, iMessage recompressed videos? Good to know. And here I thought iMessage keeps everything in original size….

We don’t have lengthy videos, just clips during a trip. My concern is the pictures. I’m basically the only person that knows around tech, while the rest didn’t even know what AirDrop was despite they all have iPhones and iPads. I was hoping for a shared album where I can download photos they took in original quality without telling them to find and upload the files (too complicated for them). It really sucks that iCloud Shared Album doesn’t retain the original size.

It’s annoying how Apple keep bragging about the cameras of their iPhones, yet their own services are limiting things to lower res and 720p. Embarrassing.

 

[ian87w]

Does air drop compress?

No, Airdrop is pure file transfer. That’s the beauty of it, but it’s intended for 1 to 1 transfer in close range and just a handful of files.

 

[now i see it]

Original definition photos are actually quite large - at least 6 MB. It takes pretty long to download a 6 MB file depending on the network connection and it eats up a lot of data for people on data restricted plans.
A folder of hi res uncompressed images is unwieldy and cruel for sharing over the internet.

Almost every imzge, even the good looking ones has been recompressed for online viewing. It’s the norm for internet sharing. Uncompressed images definitely are not.

 

[The.Glorious.Son]

Original definition photos are actually quite large - at least 6 MB. It takes pretty long to download a 6 MB file depending on the network connection and it eats up a lot of data for people on data restricted plans.
A folder of hi res uncompressed images is unwieldy and cruel for sharing over the internet.

Almost every imzge, even the good looking ones has been recompressed for online viewing. It’s the norm for internet sharing. Uncompressed images definitely are not.

I just went and looked at photos I’ve taken recently and couldn’t find one over 2 MB. Granted I’m only on the 11 (fellow PWM sufferer). Do you think I could have something jacked up in settings? I only use the default camera app.

 

[now i see it]

If camera settings are set to save in HEIF then the file size will be smaller. If set to jpg, they’ll be bigger. My camera is set to save in JPG format and most images are 6.1 to 7.1 MB

 

[The.Glorious.Son]

If camera settings are set to save in HEIF then the file size will be smaller. If set to jpg, they’ll be bigger. My camera is set to save in JPG format and most images are 6.1 to 7.1 MB

Wow. Something must be jacked up on my phone, possibly all this time without me ever noticing. The ones I take as JPG hover around the mid 2 MB range. This makes me question the quality of the photos I’m taking. I mostly view them on my phone so I don’t notice a reduction in quality.

 

[now i see it]

iPhone 8 Plus. iOS 14.8.1

 

[ericwn]

Try sending an iCloud link from the share sheet. I think that preserves the full resolution.

 

[ian87w]

Original definition photos are actually quite large - at least 6 MB. It takes pretty long to download a 6 MB file depending on the network connection and it eats up a lot of data for people on data restricted plans.
A folder of hi res uncompressed images is unwieldy and cruel for sharing over the internet.

Almost every imzge, even the good looking ones has been recompressed for online viewing. It’s the norm for internet sharing. Uncompressed images definitely are not.

Apple has implemented HEIF since ios 11, and even the iPhone 6s can view them, thus I find it silly to still put such constraint in iCloud shared albums. Heck, resizing to something like 8MP will probably be okay, but down to 3MP? That's just pathetic.

 

[ian87w]

Try sending an iCloud link from the share sheet. I think that preserves the full resolution.

Thanks, I’ll try and see how intuitive that is for others.

 

[cynics]

I just went and looked at photos I’ve taken recently and couldn’t find one over 2 MB. Granted I’m only on the 11 (fellow PWM sufferer). Do you think I could have something jacked up in settings? I only use the default camera app.

Not at all. 800kb to 10MB is completely normal.

A photos file size that is transcoded using a lossy compression format will be determined by the original size of the file, the type and efficiency of the compression being used and that files overall complexity (its resistance to be compressed).

Since we are using lossy compression (HEIC and JPG in this example) for a photo the balance is going to be file size vs image quality. In photo editing software you can set the quality of the transcode yourself to your preferences like this....



Notice the lack of return on investment when comparing the quality settings from quality = 0 to quality = 80. The file size the same. Increasing passed 80 is just decreasing the quality of the compression without gaining too much when it comes to visual quality and its possible to make it even worse, especially since this file has already been through lossy compression.

Apple leans toward favoring quality over concerning themselves with file size. There original photo was 2.7MB. So just over that 2.5MB from above..

Anyway I said all that too say this.... Nothing useful can be gained from just comparing a photos files size. File size doesn't not directly reflect anything other statistic of the photo aside from tis file size....

.....

For your specific example of "sharing a trip" and assuming when you say "best way" you mean highest quality. Then I would probably just use an iCloud link send it too them however is convenient and let them figure it out.

If you never did it, just goto the share menu and click copy iCloud link and then paste it in a text, email, whatever. This link is too the original photo and it can transfer without any lossy compression.




I wouldn't totally throw out the idea of using a Shared Photo Album. The Shared Photo Albums aren't for photo and image processing and transferring, its a place that allows you, friends, family, coworkers, etc to share images with each other as a group.

So if you are trying to share trip photos with someone that doesn't care about JPG, HEIC, color space, etc its much easier for you to put the photos in an album on their phone vs expect them to goto iCloud. download HEIC files and then important them, etc....

 

[ian87w]

I was revisiting this issue and found my own old thread, and NOTHING has changed in 2023.

Apple: We have this fancy iPhone camera that allows you to take high resolution photos and 4K video
Also Apple: Oh if you want to share it with your families, they will enjoy 3MP photos and 720P videos. You're welcome.

Seriously Apple. There's HEIC and HEVC that helps with file size, but no, you still use low res and old formats that is LARGER size than the higher res original heic.

I don't understand why all these Silicon Valley companies are making it so difficult for us to share own own videos in high original quality as provided by their own hardware, even if we paid for cloud storage.

Google Photos is the only poor alternative that at least will upload the original. But you won't be able to download it again later. No matter how you download it, Google will auto-converts the heic to JPEG for more than twice the file size. Ridiculous.