A super common problem with cell phones.
You’ve taken a great photo or video and sent it, but the person that received it didn’t get a quality copy.
Most of the time you cannot tell on the phone itself, unless of course the video is made super small, and doesn’t playback well.
Why does this happen?
Carriers (like Verizon and AT&T) compress the data in messages to save money and bandwidth. Compressing means, they reduce the quality of what you are sending, so that it can be sent, and received by your intended recipient. This happens when you are using their networks, and particularly when you don’t have the best service. It’s not a problem, in fact they do this for our benefit, we just need to learn how to work with it.
How to send high quality video & photos from your cell phone:
- First, make sure you are connected to a wireless network. Using a carrier network will work, however the chances of them compressing your video or image still remains.
- Using photos or video off of your phone
- Is the best way to ensure you aren’t sending on files that have been compressed by another persons actions.
- Using photos or video from another persons phone
- If you are receiving images from a friend or co-worker, try to airdrop them if you are an iPhone user, this ensures you get “the file” and not a compressed version of it.
- Using photos or video from Facebook
- Facebook compresses images too, for the same reasons. So if you download a photo or video from facebook expect that there will be significant data loss, and that it won’t display like you expect it will.
- How to send them:
- Email them, individually (you can try 2 or 3 at a time but the risk of compression increases). When emailing you should be prompted with a message to send the files at different file sizes – always choose the largest size, anything less will compress the photo or video.
- For large quantities of photos – Uploading them to a shared Google Drive folder can make the process easy.
- For videos, we always host these from the clients YouTube or Vimeo channel, and we are happy to help you set up one if needed. Hosting through here, keeps your site running fast, helps build SEO value, and provides a fast website user experience.