Twitter is many a thing, but a great platform for sharing high-resolution images it is not. That is set to change, however, as the social media site has revealed an update to the way in which it handles the uploading of images.
More specifically engineer for the company, Nolan O’Brien, shared on his account that the platform will preserve JPEG encoding when they’re uploading to the web-based version of Twitter. This means that the images will not be transcoded when uploaded, which often results in a poorer quality image being tweeted out.
Starting today, Twitter will preserve JPEGs as they are encoded for upload on Twitter for Web. (Caveat, cannot have EXIF orientation)
For example: the attached photo is actually a guetzli encoded JPEG at 97% quality with no chroma subsampling.https://t.co/1u37vTopkY pic.twitter.com/Eyq67nfM0E
— Nolan O'Brien (@NolanOBrien) December 11, 2019
There is one caveat though, beside it only being available for the desktop version of the app, transcoding is still implemented for the thumbnails you see in a tweet. Clicking on said thumbnail will reveal an uncompressed version of the image, which is usually how the uploader intended for it to be shared.
Added to this TechCrunch notes that Twitter will be removing all EXIF data from an image when uploaded via this new process. This means that data regarding the information and specificity of the image itself (when, where and how it was taken) will not be present.
This latest feature improvement is not as groundbreaking as some of the other enhancements that Twitter has been working on of late, but could potentially make the platform more photographer friendly, with Instagram currently the go-to social media app in the regard.
This new addition should be available on desktop in coming days and weeks.