Changes

Depending on the image size, it can take a considerable amount of time to transfer an image from the iPhone to the Apple Watch. Consider a scenario in which the extension for a WatchKit app needs to display a photo that the user has taken using the iPhone camera. Transferring such an image could take over two minutes to transfer wirelessly from the iPhone to the watch. This is clearly an unacceptable amount of time to keep the user waiting.

In reality the image that is taken by the iPhone camera is orders of magnitude larger than is necessary to fit on the display of an Apple Watch. In fact, an image from the iPhone camera roll is measured in thousands of pixels while the display of even the largest Apple Watch model has a resolution of only 312 x 390 pixels. Clearly there is significant opportunity for reducing the size of any large images before they are transferred to the Apple Watch for display.