Twitter photo sharing goes live for all users

By Mike Flacy August 9, 2011

Announced during June of this year, Twitter rolled out the ability to upload photos to all users today. When users log into the Web version of Twitter, they will be greeted with a prompt that directs users to click the new camera icon underneath the messaging box to choose a photo to upload. Twitter has put a 3MB limit on the size of photos and photos immediately appear in thumbnail mode before a user completes the message. The user also has the ability to delete the picture before sending the tweet. All images are being hosted by Photobucket and will show up as “pics.twitter.com” links within the Twitter feed.

Users also have the ability to add the pictures to Twitter’s search function by adding hashtags to the tweet. Users can also comment on photos by simply replying to the tweet containing the photo link. At the moment, only Web users can take advantage of photo uploading. Twitter had yet to add support for the mobile version of Twitter, although iPhone users will be able to send photos to Twitter through the photo application after the next, major iOS update. Also in the works, Twitter is going to provide support for photo galleries designed to gather and syndicate all photos that a user has uploaded on Twitter and third party services like TwitPic.

Photographers will be interested to learn that all EXIF data, information that identifies what equipment was used to take a picture as well as the settings used, is stripped from the photos after uploading. If a Twitter user is concerned about photo privacy, switching to a protected account keeps the public from viewing the images. In addition, deleting photos from a public stream removes the photos from Twitter search. Photos can also be flagged if deemed illegal or of a sensitive nature.

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