Beamr, a new iPhone app released today, aims to retain the resolution of your phone's photos, even as they're compressed to share over the internet.
Any time you upload a photo from your phone to places like Facebook or Instagram you lose resolution. Currently, the iPhone 5 takes 8MP photos that are 3264 x 2448 pixels big, but when those photos hit Instagram they're reduced to 612 x 612, or 5 percent of the original resolution. Same with Facebook. Your mobile photos are reduced to just a fraction of their original size in order to make services snappy over limited bandwidth.
Right now, this isn't a big issue since the images are mostly viewed on small screens. But what happens when screens get hi-res and users revisit those same photos? Or if users want to make prints later on?
Beamr lets users create a gallery of images from their phones that are compressed and uploaded, Beamr claims, without any loss of pixels. Users can then share a link to the gallery on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. This doesn't solve the problem of limited resolution on proprietary ecosystems like Instagram, but it allows photos to retain their detail for unknown future uses.
In August we found out that Instagram had 7.3 million daily mobile users for the month — beating Twitter — and who knows how many of Facebook's 219 billion photos were taken on iPhones or Androids. People are taking and sharing a mind-boggling number of photos with their phones and may not realize the tradeoffs they're making with resolution and compression. Yes, the original file remains on the phone, but there's a chance it will get deleted or lost and the only version may end up being the one on the internet.
Beamr is built by the same company that launched JPEGmini, a software program that says it reduces the size of regular JPEGs up to 5 times without axing any of the pixels. The secret, according to Dror Gill, the Chief Technical Officer of Beamr, is that both JPEGmini and Beamr have found a way to automate the JPEG compression process.
Photoshop users are familiar with the dialog box asking what quality to save a JPEG at on a scale of 1 to 12, with 12 the highest and 1 the lowest. Users can choose just how much they want it to be squeezed with the caveat that if it's compressed it too much, it's going to get ugly.
JPEGmini and Beamr know exactly where to stop in the compression process so that the files retain all their original pixels, look great and are compressed enough to fly around the internet without clogging things up.
"It's the only software that can do this without a human in the loop," Gill says.
The downside? Beamr doesn't fix the internal lo-res settings of Facebook and Instagram; it just gives users a hi-res alternative for sharing photos. Also Beamr does make users load the photos into a cheesy magazine format instead of just sending the photos. The recipients on the other end have to view the photos in that magazine format, but can download the photos and do whatever they want with them.
As an aside, we'd also like to point out that even these forms of compression are still not the best answer. Always save and back up your photos at the original, uncompressed size. (Technically all JPEGs are compressed since JPEG itself is a compression format, but phone cameras don't give you raw files so just make sure they have the highest resolution possible.) In the age of cheaper and cheaper hard drive space, it's always better to save as much information as possible.
