WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps these days. On Play Store, the app has been the top free app for quite a long time. If you’re using WhatsApp to stay connected with your friends, then you may have noticed that it automatically downloads images if you’re on mobile connection. While this works great for many, not everyone will be comfortable with this setting. Those who’re on mobile data and roaming may incur high charges from mobile provider and that’s why, such users may selectively want to download the media of their choice. Some may also want to download media only when they’re connected to WiFi.
Fortunately, WhatsApp does offers an option where you can specify what you want to download (for example; audio, video or image) when you’re on mobile data, WiFi and on roaming. Let’s delve deeper and learn how to configure this setting.
Configuring auto-download feature of WhatsApp
Go to Menu button > Settings > Chat settings > Media auto-download.
From here, you can choose when WhatsApp will automatically download the media from your chat.
Simply tap on the option that you want to configure and then select or deselect options from image, audio and video.
- When using mobile data: The selected media will be automatically downloaded when you’re using mobile data.
- When using Wi-Fi: The selected media will be automatically downloaded when you’re using WiFi.
- When roaming: The selected media will be automatically downloaded when you’re on roaming.
If you don’t want to download anything at all, then just remove the checkmark from all options, and WhatsApp will stop downloading any media to your device.
Images, audio and video that are downloaded using this method are stored in your Gallery app.
So that’s how you can stop auto-download of images, audio and video on WhatsApp for Android. The option is a life saver for those who want to specify when they want to download the media, and which media in particular.
