Seriously that you can't see a difference?!

How social media trained us to stop caring about image quality, and a manifesto on how you can stop feeding yourself with digital dog food.

Jun 26, 2025

That image you saw on social media? It’s a crushed, cropped, butchered version of someone’s work. Lol, maybe even yours.

Are you okay with that?

We’ve accepted the visual equivalent of microwave dinners: fast, easy, and flavorless.

Scroll slower. Open the image. Zoom the right way. Compare. Don’t let algorithms tell you what looks “good enough”. You should be in charge of what you consume, and that includes quality.

Look at the detail. Look at the difference between what you see regarding your own photos on your monitor… and what other people see regarding your photos on their monitor.

Exhibit A – What you see vs. what others see

When we shoot a photo with our camera (digi or film, doesn’t matter), we have the high-resolution offline version of it. That’s why you invested in that nice lens and sensor, right?

You have the high resolution oasis, where you can zoom, pan, pixel peep, be happy. You can appreciate the full details and resolution. This is what you see upon zooming in our editing software in your computer.

This is a 1920x1080px edit I made to remind people, because too many have forgotten or were never taught to care about resolution.

As soon as we send it to someone via Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or whatever other shit that Meta is involved, this is what your friends will see upon zooming with their dirty doritos fingers.

It’s extremely compressed, it didn’t need to be like that. I’m OK with compression, but some decency would be appreciated…

Even though people see it on their phones, screen size doesn’t matter much, as it only limits the canvas. What really matters is that people have forgotten the habit of zooming in and remembering what good quality looks like; and they forgot that because they’ve been conditioned to feel satisfied with cheap, microwave food level stuff.

Listen, I work in IT infrastructure and data centers. I understand how bandwidth, content delivery, compression, and storage work, especially at scale.

And the truth is: Big Tech companies realized most people don’t notice resolution loss because their brains are focused on things like color, subject, or composition. And since these companies are always looking for ways to maximize profit at the expense of user experience, they resize and compress everything passing through their servers. That’s the trade-off.

I am OK with this, but my rant is that they do it brutally. They don’t need to resize a 10986px image into a 1600px one, that’s starting with a 10% image resize.

We don’t need that anymore. We have 5G networks, caching, Gigabit home internet, partial image loading algorithms, and everything necessary to start enjoying nice things back again.

Every online service (even Flickr, but more moderately) resize images for profit. And I get it. IT infrastructure is expensive, and companies constantly push the boundaries of what users won’t notice to save serious money.

But, how far is this acceptible in 2025?

Exhibit B – You’re letting your art rot online

You picked the right film. You metered carefully. You got the focus. You nailed the moment.

And then... you gave the world a screenshot of it. Or the equivalent of the picture of a picture.

Your photo didn’t fail. The platform did, and you let it.

You fucking let it.

It’s like cooking a perfect dish, plating it with care, only to have someone eat it off a soggy napkin.

You think people don’t care about quality? Maybe. Especially millenials (who we thought it would be the opposite!)

But maybe it’s just that you never showed it to them, or made any effort to show it to them in the first place.

I think we can do better, I think we can stop being naive and egocentric about the things we see vs. what other people see, and make that extra mile to try to show it better.

The Visual Integrity Manifesto (VIM)

Here’s some things I put together, if you are interested and like it, please share and educate people around you! Here it is:

Stop uploading your work like it’s disposable.
Treat it like something that matters. Prefer posting it into places that would preserve the quality of it to a threshold that is acceptable. Substack does a quite “ok” work.
Don’t judge image quality through Instagram.
That app exists for meme sharing and entertainment. It’s not for photographers to show their work. As a photographer, it’s nice to use that to make connections and meet other photographers, but it’s defnitely not a portfolio sharing platform.
Open the file. Zoom at 100% or more.
If you don’t know what your photo really looks like, who will? Open it, inspect it, learn to identify when a image is broken up due to pixel stretching, educate yourself about resolutions, displays, and a bit of the technology involved along the way.
Never compress your own work before sharing.
Let the platform do that dirty job. Don’t help it. If you compress before sharing, it will end up being double compressed, increasing the chaos.
Host your own platform if you are serious about your creation1.
Respect your own job, host it yourself, in your own server, be the owner of your own content, and have people consuming it through your rules.2
Care. Or don’t shoot.
This one’s simple.

Conclusion

This is a strong debate, and I would love to learn from you, what do you think? I tried not to rant too much about social media, but it’s quite impossible. Let me know what you think!