3 ms·

Including 2MB images in the conversation? Has someone verified this by looking at the traffic?

by cft 10y ago

nindalf 10y ago
I can't answer that question but I can say that images shared with whatsapp are compressed to < 100kb
- cft 10y ago
  That's not true: I just looked in my WhatsApp gallery, the first image I opened was 525KB. At <100KB, any screenshot of text would show visible compression distortion around the letter edges, which they do not.
Spare_account 10y ago
My experience of WhatsApp Web has been that the images do not auto-load (Chrome on Windows 10 and Windows 7). A heavily compressed thumbnail is loaded and I have to manually click each image that I want to view. I haven't analysed any traffic and I'm not a developer but my layman's guess would be that the WhatsApp mobile app has a pre-prepared Zip file (or some other compressed container) with the 20 most recent messages from each chat plus these compressed image thumbnails and the Web Client pulls that data from the phone upon initialising. I doubt it is a big data transfer.
- cft 10y ago
  Actually, the "latest" images (whatever it means) auto-load. Only when you go up in the history you have to click to load.
ergl 10y ago
Images and videos are stored on their server for a fixed amount of time, and deleted afterwards. (So you just send an url and the client transforms it into a thumbnail). You can test this by trying to download an image for the first time after a few weeks, it will tell you that the image is no longer available, and you should ask the other recipient to send it again.
fastball 10y ago
I hadn't, but now I have. Using mitmproxy to snoop my phone, I see that all the data coming into my computer when I open up Whatsapp Web is originating from my phone. Including pictures. That being said, all of my current conversations are on the new "end-to-end-encryption" thing, which might make a difference.

3 ms·

Including 2MB images in the conversation? Has someone verified this by looking at the traffic?

by cft 10y ago

Including 2MB images in the conversation? Has someone verified this by looking at the traffic?

nindalf 10y ago
I can't answer that question but I can say that images shared with whatsapp are compressed to < 100kb
- cft 10y ago
  That's not true: I just looked in my WhatsApp gallery, the first image I opened was 525KB. At <100KB, any screenshot of text would show visible compression distortion around the letter edges, which they do not.
Spare_account 10y ago
My experience of WhatsApp Web has been that the images do not auto-load (Chrome on Windows 10 and Windows 7). A heavily compressed thumbnail is loaded and I have to manually click each image that I want to view. I haven't analysed any traffic and I'm not a developer but my layman's guess would be that the WhatsApp mobile app has a pre-prepared Zip file (or some other compressed container) with the 20 most recent messages from each chat plus these compressed image thumbnails and the Web Client pulls that data from the phone upon initialising. I doubt it is a big data transfer.
- cft 10y ago
  Actually, the "latest" images (whatever it means) auto-load. Only when you go up in the history you have to click to load.
ergl 10y ago
Images and videos are stored on their server for a fixed amount of time, and deleted afterwards. (So you just send an url and the client transforms it into a thumbnail). You can test this by trying to download an image for the first time after a few weeks, it will tell you that the image is no longer available, and you should ask the other recipient to send it again.
fastball 10y ago
I hadn't, but now I have. Using mitmproxy to snoop my phone, I see that all the data coming into my computer when I open up Whatsapp Web is originating from my phone. Including pictures. That being said, all of my current conversations are on the new "end-to-end-encryption" thing, which might make a difference.