When you take a picture on your phone, the camera turns the light signals into colour values and stores a colour for each pixel. Did you know? An iPhone 6 has an 8 megapixel camera – that’s 8 million pixels of data per picture!

8 million pixels is too large to store on a phone (about 32MB per picture), so your phone squashes this in to a 2MB file. Your eyes can’t tell the difference. Did you know? Each pixel colour is stored as a binary code Purple’s value is::

#STEP3 Once you have a file with an image stored inside – you might want to share the file with a friend! So how does that data travel from your phone to another computer? Do you know what WiFi stands for?

#STEP4 Your phone splits the file into little packets of data and adds information to each packet to help it get where it needs to go. This includes who has sent the packet, where it is going and what packet number it is.

#STEP5 Using your connection to the Internet (WiFi, or mobile data), each packet is routed to the web server via multiple routers. Each packet can take a different journey, it doesn’t matter.

#STEP6 When your friend gets your message their phone will retrieve the packets from the web server. These will be sent in the same way as your phone sent them. Then their phone will look at the packet number and rearrange the packets into a file. Did you know? Not all packets make it and some need to be resent

#STEP7 Your friends phone looks at the stored data for each pixel and turns the pixels on the touchscreen to the corresponding colour.