They look like a crutch 🩼 that enables some Premium support of the feature that otherwise is not currently supported in Telegram: inline images that are embedded between paragraphs in messages instead of residing below the message (in the preview area) or above the message (if such message is merely a caption for an image or for an album).
Of course, such crutch is not comfortable enough for several reasons:
➊ the image needs some tedious slicing and even more tedious pasting of its slices as emoji in a message,
➌ the image is somewhat distorted when its slices are resized (for example, desktop clients are very unlikely to display 100×100 of actual pixels per custom emoji on fullHD displays),
➍ the image may be distorted when its slices are inaccurately placed next to each other (there might be blank spaces between emoji, and emoji rows might overlap slightly, for example),
➎ an animated image (such as the latter example) can be greatly distorted by a phase shift when its slices' animations do not start simultaneously.
Nevertheless, such feature feels useful because sometimes an image illustrates only one thought, only one paragraph of the message (not the whole message), and thus its placement between the paragraphs seems more appropriate than the supported alternatives. And if the message itself is small enough (1000 or 3000 characters, for example), then the usual workaround (“put the paragraphs interleaved by images on a Telegraph page and ask your channel's subscribers to go there”) may feel like an unnecessary high barrier between the subscribers and the text.
Hence the suggestion:
⓵ Let Telegram users use VP9 WebM files (as in emoji) or AVC MP4 files (as in video players) for animations between paragraphs in regular messages.
⓶ Let Telegram users use WebP or PNG files (as in emoji) or JPEG files (as in pictures and albums) for images between paragraphs in regular messages.
⓷ Similar to what is done with emoji, decide which files are too large (“too many bytes”, “too many pixels”, “too many frames”, “too many seconds”, etc.), make these constraints well-known, reject the files that do not comply, do not attempt spending Telegram's money and effort on recompressing them.
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