Google Messages adding ‘Send photos faster’ resolution option

Abner Li | Apr 10 2023 - 3:11 pm PT

With RCS, pictures that you send and receive are much higher resolution than they would be via MMS, but Google Messages is now testing a “Send photos faster” setting.

Some users today are seeing a “Send photos faster” toggle appear in Settings between “Bubbles” and “Hear outgoing and incoming message sounds.” The description continues, “Resolution is reduced for faster sending,” with this presumably applying to RCS rather than SMS, which is already noticeably low-res.

This preference is not widely rolled out. It could be beneficial for those in cellular data-constrained environments or experiencing particularly slow speeds, as RCS works by uploading images to a cloud, like a backup service. As far as we can tell, Google hasn’t said what the max attachment (images, videos, and files) size is for its implementation of RCS, but AT&T and T-Mobile both list up to 100MB.

Messages already offers the ability to have videos uploaded to Google Photos instead of text (MMS). At one point, Google was testing a similar option for images, but it was removed for the initial launch.