More often than not when you upload a photo to somewhere like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and so on, these images are compressed. The reason behind it is because our smartphones and cameras take photos which in its original format are huge files, and obviously uploading huge files takes a long time to upload, a long time to download, and takes up a lot of storage.
This is why many platforms come with some form of image compression technology built into them. Facebook has one and it seems that the social network has decided to make it open source, meaning that third-party developers will be able to take advantage of it. Dubbed “Spectrum”, this image compression tech can be used to integrate into iOS and Android apps if developers choose to take advantage of it.
Now here’s the funny thing: Facebook is known for many things, but image compression isn’t necessarily one that you might associate with the social networking giant. There is a good chance that there might be better tools out there for developers to choose from, but since it is open source, it does make it more accessible, especially to smaller developers who don’t have the resources to develop their own image compression algorithms. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, head on over to Spectrum’s website for more details.
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