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even the "full" sized images are filled with compression artifacts and lose lots of quality after upload, not as badly as in facebook but still surprising and disappointing for a photo-centric app. i've tried a number of things to improve final quality but nothing worked well. if anyone has tips please share them!

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It makes sense given the volumes of photos and bandwidth they have to deal with, but if they cared about visual quality they'd let users tradeoff number of daily uploads for higher quality/resolution but the know the vast majority views it on phones and couldn't care less.

There are probably UI patterns that could help balance the technical challenges bandwidth with the utility of high resolution images. Wikipedia for instance defaults to low resolution images but in 1-2 clicks you can access a high resolution view. This restricts the need to serve high resolution images to only the people who really do care about it.

It's not just bandwidth, it's also storage at instagram scale, but mostly because neither instagram nor the vast majority of their users find much utility in high resolution.

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