Twitter’s Jack Dorsey just unfollowed Mark Zuckerberg on Twitter as the firm moves to allow its users to upload 8 Megapixel photos up to 16 Megapixels without loss in quality.
Twitter did not allow this previously as the images were compressed to save size and download latency. From now the JPEG quality will be maintained despite consecutive image uploads.
However, Twitter is far away from taking on Facebook and Instagram as this improvement is only applicable to images that are no more than 4096 pixels. The size of the image shouldn’t be more than 5MB.
Twitter has been transcoding the images and videos, as a result, the compression makes them load faster on web and mobile devices. To add on that, Twitter will be getting rid of the EXIF data which provides more details about user images.
Although this data helps photographers in mapping out the image aperture, ISO setting and other technical aspects of the photos. It also makes it easier for people with ill-intentions to retrieve location-based details.
By Twitter removing it, it will mean users information is secure.
“Support for 4096×4096 image uploads effected in 2018 to Twitter for Web. You can view them on, Twitter for iPad and Twitter for Mac when clicking/tapping to open the image.
Now the quality can be what you make it- keep your JPEGs crisp and clear!”, said Nolan O’Brien, Engineer for Twitter.
He added further that, other categories of images like Avatars will getting the same improvement in the coming year.
For photographers and cinematographers trying to showcase the prowess in the field. There is still a little bit of disappointment.
There will still be a difficulty uploading full-size high-resolution images from your DSLR. Images above the aforementioned limit will still be.
On the same tweet, Nolan notes a few steps to confirm if your image will undergo transcoding or not.
Such images that have an orientation set to rotate the image will still undergo the process. If images are over 4096 pixels in any dimension, they will be transcoded.
He as well adds that, if it is over 5MBs, it will be transcoded. Images inaccurately compressed worse than a pixel per byte will still undergo transcoding.
According to Digital Information World, transcoding degrades the photo quality. This is inconvenient for professional graphic designers and passionate photographers who like to share their work with the world via Twitter.
However, this is adventurous for people still suing phones to their uploads as the quality won’t be affected at all.
Image thumbnails will be transcoded and compressed. So, the images on your feed will still look the same. once you click through, you will be able to access the full image if it’s a JPEG.