Illustration: The Verge
A few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp was in the process of rolling out HD photo sharing, with HD video soon to follow. As of today, the process is complete: Meta has confirmed to The Verge that both HD photos and HD videos are available to everyone.
“Both HD photos and HD videos have rolled out globally,” WhatsApp spokesperson Ellie Heatrick told The Verge in an emailed statement. The company also posted a promotional video to Threads earlier today encouraging users to “share epic moments” with the new feature, which has been available to beta testers for the past few months.
After you select a photo or video to send from your camera roll, you should see an “HD” button at the top of your screen (to the left of the crop tool). Once you select this, a menu will pop up, prompting you to select “Standard Quality” or “HD Quality.”
If you’re not seeing this button yet, keep an eye out — I had to reopen the App Store a couple times before the option to update finally popped up.
Previously, WhatsApp users could only send images in very compressed quality, which gave the app a major disadvantage compared to competing services like iMessage.
HD photos and videos come amid a number of other significant updates that seem poised to make WhatsApp more competitive in the business sphere. Meta recently released a native version of the app for macOS, which supports video calls of up to eight participants and audio calls of up to 32. Screen Sharing is newly available for the platform, as are unnamed group chats.
