Twitter is Testing Larger Photos, 4K Images

“Sometimes it’s better said with a picture or a video.” Twitter is testing a couple of new features that could improve the way photos appear on the social media platform. In a series of tweets Wednesday, Twitter Support said Twitter is testing larger photos and 4K images over the next few weeks. 

We can all agree that sharing pictures on Twitter has never been the best experience, but thanks to the social platform now testing 4K and full-sized images, two of the biggest complaints are now being addressed.

Twitter isn’t a photo-first social app the way Instagram and others are, but images are still a big part of what happens there. From artists sharing their hard work, photographers uploading shots from a recent photoshoot, or people circulating the latest memes, images are everywhere on Twitter.

As it currently stands, though, the way images are handled on Twitter leaves a lot to be desired. Photos uploaded from the Android and iOS apps are limited to 5MB in size, and while that’s fine for casual use, it means a lot of resolution and detail from the original file gets lost in translation.

There’s also the way Twitter automatically crops images on the timeline. This is designed to make it easy to scroll through Tweets and make sure everything has a consistent look, but as most users have likely experienced, this automatic cropping often crops out the wrong part of an image — thus forcing people to tap on the actual Tweet/photo to see what was shared.

In one test, on iOS and Android, when you tweet a single image, the way it appears in the tweet composer is how it’ll look in the timeline — as in, people scrolling by will see the full image, not a cropped preview that requires them to click to expand.

Twitter says that the settings will appear “if you’re in the test”, showing not everyone is going to get the new features right away. Beyond Twitter’s “over the next few weeks” statement, there’s no clear indication as to a more specific timeline.

Twitter is also testing ways for users to upload and view 4K images, again on iOS and Android. If you’re part of the test, you can go to your data usage settings and update your high-quality-image preferences to get started. 

We don’t know if these features will end up rolling out to all accounts, or when that could happen. However, users have been able to upload higher-resolution photos to the site from the desktop version since 2018.