Twitter is increasing its emphasis on the photos in users’ feeds. The firm undertook an upgrade on Monday, allowing full square and landscape images to be displayed in a web feed without any awkward cropping.
More than just bigger images
Anyone who regularly tweets photos will be really glad to hear this news as it was really frustrating to post photos just to see Twitter crop them. Twitter made the announcement regarding the change to photos yesterday, and it appears that it has already been rolled out.
The announcement regarding the change came from product manager Akarshan Kumar, who also said that Twitter used to be an all-text platform in the beginning, but rich media have become an essential part of the overall experience with time. “Starting today, we’re making your Twitter.com timeline more immersive by un-cropping photos, so you can experience and present them as they were meant to be viewed,” Kumar said in a blog post.
The shift to un-cropped single images is just one change. “We’re also introducing larger, more beautiful multi-photo displays, which bring out more of each photo,” Kumar said.
Twitter is also making changes to the way in which it displays tweets with multiple attached photos. Those photos will be displayed in a manner similar to the way a photo collection is displayed on Facebook, where one image is favored in the preview while others are put off to the side. This way there is one big image that is easily visible compared to before when there were several tiny images that were hard to see.
Twitter making platform visually attractive
Twitter is clearly making a major effort to beef up its visual engagement and delivery strategy, and the latest change in the way the images are displayed is the third major modification for the micro-blogging firm this year. In November, the team swapped the star icon button to ‘favorite’ for a heart icon that represented a ‘like’. Although it was a minor change, it prompted a major controversy.
In August, Twitter also added an auto-play video feature, and in October, the firm introduced the Moments feature in the U.S. With the introduction of the Moments feature, the company intended to reduce the sheer volume of tweet-noise and curate a shortlist of the most popular stories on the platform.
