Twitter’s about to get a little more photo friendly for users.
The social network, according to engineer Nolan O’Brien, will no longer further compress JPEG photos uploaded, instead preserving the image at the upload’s initial encoded quality.
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O’Brien demonstrated this by uploading a 1.57 MB photo of autumn leaves.
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
It might sound insignificant, but Twitter (and even Instagram) previously degraded image quality in a bid to improve load times and data usage for users.
Twitter will still compress thumbnails, but once you tap on a picture, it’ll be displayed at its encoded quality.
More interestingly, avatars will also receive similar treatment in the new year.
Metadata, data within images that include location information and other potential personal indicators, will continue to be stripped, O’Brien added.
It’s a nice little tweak, and should make Twitter more photo-friendly.
The change is in effect from Wednesday 11 December.
Feature image: Twitter
