Bye bye data, probably.

The concept is lossless vs lossy compressions. Facebook is known to do all manner of lossy transformations on images, while whatsapp likely (definitely if you believe it is e2e encrypted) would just transfer the bits.

Re-sizing would trash the payload, but any type of conversion that losslessly preservers the raster (the matrix of pixels) would likely still be recoverable.

> whatsapp likely (definitely if you believe it is e2e encrypted) would just transfer the bits

They could still compress images on the client side before sending the message. Dunno if they do or not, didn’t check. Just saying that E2EE does not prevent them from doing so.

They do, you can choose a level but they still do. Document sending is uncompressed though, but won't generate a thumbnail in the chat

WhatsApp compresses the image/video on the device before sending.

Example video 13.2MB => 7.2MB

you can choose to send as document/uncompressed.

Or something like Amazon Photos which can store RAWs...

I've wondered whether this could be addressed making the pixel adjustments in the form of a QR code. Much lower data storage, but much better chance of surviving image transforms thanks to the built-in resilience and redundancy.