Google Messages on Android could soon get a big photo-sharing boost

• A new photo-sharing option has been spotted in Google Messages
• It would enable higher-resolution image sharing over RCS
• For now the relevant code is hidden inside the beta version of the app

Google is continuing to push Google Messages as the all-purpose messaging app for Android – and it could soon introduce a new feature that improves the photo-sharing experience for users, something that’s a key part of any chat app.

As spotted by the team at Android Authority, hidden code in the latest beta version of Google Messages for Android can be enabled to activate a photo quality picker: you can choose from “original quality” (HD+) or “reduced quality” (HD).

While a lot of the time you’re going to want to share photos in the best quality possible, the benefit of going with the reduced quality option is a smaller file size – so the message gets sent and received more quickly, and uses up less data.

This will also require the more advanced RCS feature to be enabled, rather than plain old SMS. As it stands, photos sent over RCS in Google Messages are at a significantly better resolution than SMS, but still compressed from their original size.

Coming soon

As ever with code like this, there’s no guarantee that Google will decide to keep the feature and push it out properly into the app. However, it makes sense for an option like this to be included, to match up with similar options in…