This should definitely at least be surfaced in a setting somewhere, even if the default is to compress images. That being said, Signal is not designed for photogrphers to share high quality photos. I'd guess that any serious photographer has another photosharing platform that they use to share high quality photos.
Is Signal "designed for" sharing evidence privately with an attorney? How about "designed for" privately getting documentation of crimes or corruption out of oppressive regimes? If used for those purposes, should it edit the evidence along the way?
It's a general purpose secure/private communications tool. Photographers (which, let's be honest, is anyone with a camera phone!) sharing photos is absolutely in-bounds for Signal's intended use case. That's why they put this silly recompression mis-feature into the app in the first place.
This isn't a "you're holding it wrong".
> I'd guess that any serious photographer has another photosharing platform that they use to share high quality photos.
I'm a serious photographer, and I don't. Almost all of my photography is shared exclusively in private.
Signal is for private, end-to-end encrypted communications. There's no other common, private, secure, end-to-end encrypted option for sending photos (or files of any type) in this manner.
This is why I'm offering this criticism: because Signal is good and important, and stands alone in being both a) secure and b) widespread.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that different tools are optimized to solve different problems. Signal is focused on solving the problems of privacy and encrypted messaging. Other tools are focused on solving the problem of sharing high fidelity photos.
> I'm a serious photographer, and I don't... There's no other common, private, secure, end-to-end encrypted option for sending photos (or files of any type) in this manner.
There ARE tools for this. But they will most likely be self-hosted. If it is important to you to have both high fidelity photos AND end to end encryption, it may be time to set up a PhotoPrism or Nextcloud instance with a Cryptomator vault. Also, encrypted email services are a good option.
Given the mention of the MP3 blind testing, I was thinking there'd be some kind of analysis of the difference between the various byte-sizes of JPGs rather than just "dogshit" - that would have been extremely interesting.
