Messaging

Why Photos Can Look Worse After You Send Them

A photo can look sharp in your gallery but softer after you send it through a messaging or social app. Fine text may become harder to read, hair and grass may lose detail, and a picture that originally occupied several megabytes may arrive as a much smaller file. This usually does not mean the camera changed the photo after you took it. The more common explanation is that the sharing service created a different version for transmission or display. It may reduce the image dimensions, compress the image more strongly, or do both.