Twitter is currently testing a new feature that will definitely make photographers and graphic artists happy. Revealed by company chief design officer Dantley Davis, the platform has rolled out to a small group of people on iOS and Android the ability to share full-size image previews of any orientation on their respective feeds.
At present, images shared on Twitter are automatically cropped to a default size when they are previewed on the main feed in order to maintain uniformity. To the frustration of creators on the platform, cropping often leaves out a good portion of an overall photo or artwork from being viewed by other users or followers – most commonly affecting those presented in vertical orientation. The images are only presented in their full size when the previews are clicked on – but in most cases, tweets such as these are often seen by users when scrolling through their respective feeds.
“With this test, we hope to learn if this new approach is better and what changes we need to make to provide a ‘what you see is what you get’ experience for Tweets with images,” Davis said. “People in the test will see that most Tweets with a single image in standard aspect ratio will appear uncropped when posted.”
Today we’re launching a test to a small group on iOS and Android to give people an accurate preview of how their images will appear when they Tweet a photo. pic.twitter.com/cxu7wv3Khs
— Dantley Davis (@dantley) March 10, 2021
However, he also noted that cropping will still occur only for ultra wide or tall images, where they will instead be centre-cropped accordingly. Those exempted from cropping during this test are photos or artwork that are presented in 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios, which are the common formats shared on Twitter.
Photographers and graphic artists tend to rely on Twitter to showcase their work, especially to reach a wider audience outside of certain platforms such as Behance and DeviantArt. Implementing this change not only would benefit these creators, but also improves the platform’s capability for image sharing – enabling it to be on par or better with competitors such as Instagram and Facebook.
As mentioned earlier, the full-size image preview feature is currently rolled out to selected users on mobile for testing. Twitter has not revealed any plans to have this feature available to the public or other supported platforms at this time.
