Facebook is one of the biggest tech companies in the world and with Facebook Messenger, the company has one of the most used instant messengers on the planet, boasting a user base of more than 1 billion, just after WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook.
Despite all of its know-how, Facebook has for a long time confined users of Messenger to sending low quality photos through the app, presumably in the name of speeding up things. But this makes little sense in a world where we have fast 4G LTE networks nearly everywhere.
Today, many smartphones have top-notch cameras that can capture 4K (UHD) photos, which means they easily weigh more than the slightly over 2MB limit on Messenger. Before today’s update, sending a 4K photo through Messenger was a waste of time because the app automatically compressed it to 2K, thus losing a huge chunk of its original quality. But this is no more.
The company has listened to the millions who use the app and in the latest update, users of Facebook Messenger can now share photos in their original quality (4K), which can weigh over 8MB. The maximum resolution of photos that users will be able to share via the updated Facebook Messenger is 4096 x 4096 pixels, which is the highest resolution most – or some – of the phones we own can manage to capture. According to Facebook, Messenger sees more than 17 billion photos exchanged on a monthly basis, which makes this update a big deal.
The new update is already rolling out to Messenger users in various markets across the globe, starting with North America, the UK, France, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Japan. More markets will follow in the coming weeks.
