Prevent Verizon picture messages from resizing pictures

Have you noticed that pictures sent from your Verizon phone are small and low-resolution? The fix is to change the phone's camera resolution. Read on for details.

I have a Samsung Intensity with Verizon Wireless. This phone's highest camera resolution is 1280 x 960 pixels, which I naturally set it at. Imagine my surprise, then, when I sent picture messages to my Gmail account, and the pictures were an ugly 640 x 480! I tried sending just one picture at a time, rather than 4, but that didn't help.

A few minutes of googling led me to a Verizon forum post with the solution: change the camera's resolution to 1024 x 768. It's not intuitive - lower the camera resolution to get a higher resolution picture - but it works! Apparently this applies to other Verizon phones as well.

You'll notice that when you attach a 1280 x 960 picture to a message, the phone briefly displays "Copying and resizing to send". The phone shrinks the picture down to 640 x 480 before attaching it. However, when the original picture is 1024 x 768, this message doesn't appear, and the phone attaches the picture at full resolution.

I tested this, and my 1280 x 960 photos arrived in my email as 640 x 480 pictures, averaging 60 KB. The 1024 x 768 photos arrived as 1024 x 768, around 250 KB.

Update 6/26/2010: I discovered that if you try to attach a 2nd (or 3rd, etc.) 1024 x 768 picture to a single picture message, the first one will be around 250 KB, but the rest will be resized to around 40 KB. They'll all be 1024 x 768, but all pictures after the first one will be lower quality. To get them all in 1024 x 768 and around 250 KB, you'll have to send them one at a time.

Please share your thoughts by commenting below!  As always, contact OptimWise for more information or assistance!

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