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There are a few hidden features on your phone that could be taking up tons of data and draining your device without your knowledge. And, though it flies under the radar more than Photos or apps like Facebook. iMessage can also be a source of data-drainage. According to many tech experts, you need to turn on this iMessage setting immediately — it frees up so much data.
Low Quality Image Mode
We’ve become so accustomed to seeing the best quality images on every platform that we may naturally assume every photo we send, even on iMessage, should be top quality. But that isn’t always necessary. And, in fact, turning on one specific setting — Low Quality Image Mode — can help free up tons of data, according to Patrick Sinclair, founder and tech blogger at Allhomerobotics.com.
“As the name implies, it makes it so that all images you send over iMessage are compressed down to a lower resolution, which leads to massive savings in data usage, upload times, and even battery life to an extent,” Sinclair says. “This is because iMessage by default uploads photos at the native resolution they were captured in, which usually hover around the 2MB range. If you send photos frequently, or are sending a batch of them at once, this can drain your data very quickly.”
On the other hand, low quality image mode compresses these photos before sending them so that the final file size totals to no more than around a 100kB at most, Sinclair says. “That's a huge amount of data and time saved,” he says. “And the best part, the final compressed image, although at a lower resolution than the original, still looks just about identical to the original unless you really zoom in there and look for the imperfections.”
Sinclair says to note that low quality image mode only affects the resolution of images you send, not the ones you receive. “The sender of those images must have the setting on for his own iPhone for you to receive the compressed images,” Sinclair says. “Still though, it's bound to save you a lot of data.”
