If you've been using WhatsApp for a while, you'll recall how difficult it was to share links - extremely brief previews, no thumbnails, and so on. After a lengthy wait, the Meta-owned social network eventually followed Telegram's lead and released an upgrade with improved image previews for links. It is now introducing a similar functionality for document previews.
The most recent information is provided by WABetaInfo. They claim that WhatsApp will release an upgrade that will create a suitable preview when photos and videos are transferred as documents. The functionality is presently available on WhatsApp beta version 2.22.5.11 and will be available to all users in the next weeks.
Those that send a lot of photographs on the platform will attest that this change is far from easy. WhatsApp is known to degrade image quality when transferring it. The software included a feature that is meant to preserve image quality, however it fails miserably. The size difference between data saving compression and higher quality compression is negligible.
As a result, the only option to ensure that an image retains its original quality on WhatsApp is to submit it as a document. But even this has drawbacks. One of them is that the receiver cannot know what the document contains without first opening it. They are merely shown a jumbled file name and extension. However, the aforementioned update will provide those much-needed previews when they become available.
