29 December 2019

cnet: Twitter relaxes photo limits so those detailed shots look better

Twitter now preserves your JPEG photo’s original compression settings. His example JPEG image had been encoded with Google's Guetzli compression technology, which is slow to use but shrinks file sizes compared to typical JPEG photos. When you’re actually looking at photos, most of the time you’ll likely see a Twitter-compressed version, for example the 680-pixel-wide shot created for viewing in the timeline. But you’ll see the original if you click or tap on it using Twitter for the web or using the Twitter app for iPads or Macs.


And Twitter will recompress photos larger than 4096x4096 pixels or 5MB in size. Images are not unbounded in file size or resolution, but those limits are very generous, O'Brien said.

Indeed, a maximum of 4096x4096 is a significant step above Facebook, which limits photo width to 2048 pixels, and its photo-sharing service Instagram, which caps photos at a maximum of 1080 pixels wide and 1350 pixels tall. At SmugMug’s Flickr photo-sharing service, the maximum width shown is 2048 pixels, but Flickr shows pro members’ shots at 6144 pixels as long as viewers are using a screen with high enough resolution.

Stephen Shankland

Good to see Twitter, of all social networks, making progress in this area, not to mention with a better offer than dedicated photography sites like Flickr! I have suspected for some time that Twitter is slowly building a photo product to challenge Instagram – and there have been some, rather timid, moves in that direction, for example adding alternative description for images and, earlier this year, a dedicated camera included in the mobile apps.

But other features related to photos are massively underdeveloped. Twitter doesn’t have any good way to organize and display photos, to highlight them among the rest of your tweets. There are of course hashtags, but these work globally for photos and text; there is a dedicated Media section on Twitter profiles, but this can also include images from articles and video clips, and it has the same chronological display from your most recent media tweets to older. I’m curious to see if and how Twitter decides to expand this feature set in the future.

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