WhatsApp is adding the ability to send HD photos, rather than the low-quality compressed photos it currently sends.

Compressed photos are a throwback to the days of strict SMS/MMS messaging, cellular data limits, and slow speeds. As more advanced messaging protocols — Signal, Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google RCS — have gained in popularity, and cellular limits have improved, the need to compress photos has dropped significantly for everything except SMS/MMS.

Unfortunately, WhatsApp has been slower to adapt than some of its rivals, still relying on heavy compression when sending photos. According to a new report by WABetaInfo, that is is on the verge of changing. A new beta is giving users the ability to send a high-quality version of a photo.

Note that this does not mean that you can send photos in their original quality because this option preserves image dimensions, but light compression is still applied to the image. In addition, the default option is always “Standard quality” for any photo. This means you have to select the HD option every time you want to share a new photo with improved quality.

When you send a photo by choosing the “high quality” option, it is marked as a high-quality photo so a new tag is automatically added to the message bubble: this information also helps the recipient understand when a photo is sent by using this feature. It is worth noting that this feature is limited to images shared within your conversations. This means there is no way to send a video with better quality without sending it as a document, and this feature is not available when sharing photos by using status updates.

The change is good news for WhatsApp users.