Question about camera/photo quality

[Polygonius]

i´m not a photographer, just taking snapshots from my phone. So okay, i don not expect quality. But lot of my personell photos came from friends.... and are very big, have a lot of Megapixels... But even the biggest files are mostly pixellated... or bad quality in other reasons. 

 

To compare i downloaded some pics from the net. They are mostly ultrasharp, depixelated, fine.... and are needs just a minimum of MB. 

Well jpg-compression ist maybe till 70% not really visible and shrinks the filesize by 99,5% of the same quality really extrem. 

So, whats the reason for this bad quality of the photos from my friends? Bad development? bad camera????... Why are the files so big by this worse quality? 

 And are there tipps and tricks for acceptable "snapshots" with cehap phone-cameras?

[stokerg]

Hi Polygonius,

What type of phone do you have, are you shooting with the front or back camera? 

Can you share one of the images here so we can see how it looks?

A lot of this will come down to the quality of the camera you are shooting with.  When you've looked at the other images you are sent, have they also been shot on the same camera? 

[IanSG]

The first thing to point out is that the quality of an image has very little to do with the number of pixels - megapixel count is just marketting hype!  It's possible to take great pictures with a phone camera but they're severely limited by having tiny lenses and tiny sensors - not a problem if you've got plenty of light but the quality realy suffers once the light goes.

[Affinity Revolution]

As Ian pointed out, lightning is HUGE. Your photos will look better from a cell phone camera with good light than a DSLR with bad light. 

Here's an interesting video I watched the other day, where an iPhone is pushed all the way to wedding photography! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLZJS2k2V4k