Short answer

No. Leave your phones on their normal, good-quality camera setting. Turning the resolution down will not make the app faster, because the full-size photo is not what the app is moving around. It would, however, permanently reduce the quality of the record you are building.

Why it does not help

When a photo is uploaded, Civic.ly resizes it into three versions and keeps the original. Which one you get depends on what you are doing:

  • The mobile app is served the small version. That is the one your field team downloads all day, and it is already small regardless of what the camera shot.
  • The web app shows a mid-size version on the record.
  • The original stays on the record and can be downloaded whenever you need it, at full quality.

So the large file makes one journey, from the phone that took it, once. The repeated traffic that affects how the app feels day to day is all the small version. Dropping your camera to a lower setting shrinks that single upload slightly and changes nothing else.

If the app feels slow or photos seem stuck, the cause is almost always elsewhere. Start with the sync queue, which shows you exactly what is waiting and lets you retry anything that has stalled.

Why it actively costs you something

The photo on an asset or a defect is evidence, and it is the version of the record you cannot go back and improve. A crack, a worn fixing, a frayed rope or a corroded bolt is often only a few pixels wide in the frame. A photo taken at a reduced setting can still look perfectly acceptable on a phone screen and lack the detail someone needs a year later, when they are trying to judge from the record whether something has got worse.

There is also a forward-looking reason. Image analysis is a direction the product is moving in, and the more detail a photo holds, the more can be read from it later. Photos taken today at a reduced resolution cannot be re-taken retrospectively.

The one setting that does matter

Keep the camera on its standard high-quality mode, not on an extra-large, RAW or "maximum" mode if your phone offers one. Uploads are capped at 20 MB per file, which is comfortably above any normal phone photo but can be exceeded by those specialist modes, and a file over the cap will fail to upload.

The camera setting genuinely worth checking is not resolution at all, it is location. A photo with no GPS data attached cannot place an asset on the map, and that is the setting that causes real problems in the field.