The four qualities in FIGS. 1A-1E are only one example of how an image can be encoded at varying qualities. In exemplary embodiments, images may be encoded with as few as two qualities (e.g., a thumbnail version as depicted in FIG. 1A and a full quality version as depicted in FIG. 1E), three qualities (e.g., a thumbnail corresponding to the image from FIG. 1A, a low-quality version which may correspond to the image from FIG. 1C or 1D, and a high quality version corresponding to the image from FIG. 1E), or may be encoded with more than four qualities.
An exemplary system for distributing images such as those described above is next described with respect to FIG. 2.
Exemplary Communication Environment
As shown in FIG. 2, exemplary embodiments may provide communications services (potentially including end-to-end encryption) and/or social networking services between a sending client 202 and a receiving client 212-i facilitated by an intermediate server 204. Some embodiments described herein utilize server-side fan out to transmit group messages and broadcasts. In a server-side fan out procedure, the sending client 202 transmits a single copy of the message to the server 204, which then transmits a copy of the update to the appropriate recipient clients 212-i. To this end, the intermediate server 204 may store client information in a client database 206, allowing for the distribution of messages to the client devices 212-i.
