Twitter brings image upload improvements and also adds support for iOS Live Photos

Twitter is making some changes to how it processes pictures that are uploaded to the platform. Nolan O’Brien, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Twitter shared through a tweet today that the platform will preserve all JPEG files “as they are encoded for upload on Twitter for Web”. This means that there will be very little loss of quality since the image will not be transcoded during upload.

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

However, there are a few limitations to this improvement. The changes are applicable starting today only for uploads done through Twitter for the Web. This means that uploads from the iOS and Android apps would still be compressed. Additionally, EXIF information from images will still be stripped off. For those not in the know, EXIF information can contain metadata such as ISO, Shutter Speed, and other image information, including the location of information in some cases. The exclusion of this data could also thus be due to security reasons.

However, the Twitter employee added that there will still be limits to file size or resolution, albeit generous, where up to 16-megapixel images could also be preserved in a square aspect ratio.

Give the gift of GIFs. You can now upload your iOS Live Photos as GIFs anywhere you upload photos on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/D8TIfsBwyd
— Twitter (@Twitter) December 11, 2019

That is not all for the changes coming to image upload, as the company also announced today that iOS users will now be able to upload Live Photos shot on their devices to Twitter as a GIF. Users of the social media platform that prefer capturing Live Photos can now share the images through the way of GIFs natively. While Live Photos debuted on the iPhone long ago, it is interesting to see the microblogging site add this functionality.