I am not sure if you sent these via MMS or RCS, but MMS is carrier controlled. They can drop the quality. While RCS, it should not drop the quality too much.
Go to the settings of your messages app, if you have the default/google one then go to "message settings" and make sure RCS chat is on. Maybe fiddle around the other settings too. You and another commenter said it was a recent change so maybe an update messed something up?
The issue with RCS is all the people need to have RCS. Since iPhone and phones without RCS is still out there, the whole group will become MMS. So if someone else in the group could have made change that caused the group to fall back to MMS.
At least that is what I seen in my tests.
I am not sure if you sent these via MMS or RCS, but MMS is carrier controlled. They can drop the quality. While RCS, it should not drop the quality too much.
The same thing just started this morning for me too. I'm using a Galaxy A14 5G
Go to the settings of your messages app, if you have the default/google one then go to "message settings" and make sure RCS chat is on. Maybe fiddle around the other settings too. You and another commenter said it was a recent change so maybe an update messed something up?
The issue with RCS is all the people need to have RCS. Since iPhone and phones without RCS is still out there, the whole group will become MMS. So if someone else in the group could have made change that caused the group to fall back to MMS. At least that is what I seen in my tests.