Send a photo in a chat
How a picture is resized, stripped of its EXIF location data and encrypted before it leaves your device, and the six looks you can send it under.
A photo in a chat is encrypted on your device like everything else, and it is prepared before it is encrypted: resized, re-encoded, and stripped of the data your camera wrote into it. You do not have to do anything for that — it happens when you pick the picture.
Send one
- In the chat, press the paperclip (Attach a file) in the message row and choose the picture.Web & desktop screenshotThe paperclip in the message row opens the picker. Private.Ki only ever sees the picture you choose.This capture is produced by the screenshot pipeline and will appear here.
The paperclip in the message row opens the picker. Private.Ki only ever sees the picture you choose.Web & desktop iPhone screenshotThe paperclip in the message row opens the picker. Private.Ki only ever sees the picture you choose.Same screen as on the web, single column. This capture is produced by the screenshot pipeline and will appear here.The paperclip in the message row opens the picker. Private.Ki only ever sees the picture you choose.iPhone Android screenshotThe paperclip in the message row opens the picker. Private.Ki only ever sees the picture you choose.Same screen as on the web, single column. This capture is produced by the screenshot pipeline and will appear here.The paperclip in the message row opens the picker. Private.Ki only ever sees the picture you choose.Android - It appears above the message box as a staged picture, with a cross to take it off again. You can type a line to go with it.Web & desktop screenshotThe staged picture above the message box, with the cross that takes it off again and room for a line of text.This capture is produced by the screenshot pipeline and will appear here.
The staged picture above the message box, with the cross that takes it off again and room for a line of text.Web & desktop iPhone screenshotThe staged picture above the message box, with the cross that takes it off again and room for a line of text.Same screen as on the web, single column. This capture is produced by the screenshot pipeline and will appear here.The staged picture above the message box, with the cross that takes it off again and room for a line of text.iPhone Android screenshotThe staged picture above the message box, with the cross that takes it off again and room for a line of text.Same screen as on the web, single column. This capture is produced by the screenshot pipeline and will appear here.The staged picture above the message box, with the cross that takes it off again and room for a line of text.Android - Press send. The picture is encrypted to the other person's key, uploaded as its own encrypted object, and appears in the conversation.
On a phone the paperclip opens your system photo picker, so Private.Ki sees only the picture you choose and gets no access to your library.
What happens to the picture before it is sent
Every chat photo goes through one pass on your device:
- Resized to about 2048 pixels on its long edge, never enlarged.
- Re-encoded — as JPEG for photographs, kept lossless for graphics and screenshots. A picture already small enough may be sent exactly as it is.
- EXIF removed. The camera model, the date and — the one that matters — the GPS location written into the file are not carried over, because the picture is written fresh. The orientation is applied to the pixels first, so it still appears the right way up.
Animated pictures (GIF and animated WebP) and SVG are passed through untouched, so an animation keeps animating.
The six looks
While the picture is staged you can send it under a look. The strip under the staged photo offers Original · Vivid · Warm · Cool · Mono · Fade, and what you see in the preview is what the other person gets — the look is baked into the pixels in the same pass that resizes the picture, not stored as a setting.
Worth knowing:
- The strip appears for exactly one staged photo (JPEG, PNG or still WebP) and nothing else attached beside it. Two pictures at once, or a video encoding alongside, and there is no strip.
- It is offered in the web app and the Android app. On iPhone a chat photo is always sent as Original.
- Original is the plain path: nothing is re-processed for the look, and a picture that would have kept its own bytes still does.
- Any other look means the picture is re-encoded, so a small photo sent under a look can come out slightly larger than the file you picked, and it loses its EXIF in every case.
- The choice belongs to that staged picture. Remove it, replace it or add a second one and the look is Original again.
On Android the look is applied the moment you tap it, so Send is instant. On the web it is applied when you press send, which takes a fraction of a second on a large photo.
Once it has been sent
Tap a photo in the conversation to open it full size. It is downloaded and decrypted on your device each time, which is why a large picture takes a moment before the first pixels appear.
A photo can also be sent as View once — the toggle on the staged picture — in which case there is no picture in the transcript at all, just a placeholder to tap. See View once.
Limits
- A chat photo is an internal attachment, so it takes the internal ceiling: up to 40 MiB of encrypted data per file. Because photos are resized first, this is very hard to reach.
- The 25 MB per file rule you may have read about is the email rule — see Attachments. It applies to mail, not to prepared chat photos.
- Videos have their own page and their own, larger ceiling: Send a video in a chat.
What our server sees
Cannot see
- The picture, its dimensions, its type or its filename — everything is inside the encryption
- Where the photo was taken; the location data is removed on your device before encryption
Can see
- That an encrypted object of a certain size belongs to a certain message
Common questions
Is the original quality kept?
No. A chat photo is resized to about 2048 pixels on the long edge and re-encoded, which is what keeps chats quick. Send the file as an email attachment if you need the original bytes.
Does the other person see the look, or a filter they can remove?
They see the picture. A look is baked into the pixels before encryption; there is nothing to switch off at the other end.
Can I crop or draw on a photo?
No. The looks strip is the only editing in the chat composer.
Why does my screenshot stay sharp while a photo is re-compressed?
Screenshots and graphics are recognised as such and kept lossless rather than turned into a JPEG.