Twitter to Preserve Quality of JPEG Images Uploaded via Web

Nolan O’Brien has today confirmed in a tweet that JPEG encoding will now be preserved in images uploaded to Twitter via the web. Previously, JPEG images uploaded to Twitter were transcoded, which meant lower quality pictures but now, the social network will preserve 97% of uploaded JPEG’s quality (via Engadget).

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

Nolan, an engineer at Twitter, also shared an example photo and if you click through the image, the results are pretty impressive. The full impact is, however, only observed if the uploaded image is a JPEG file and is viewed in full size. Nolan notes that any thumbnails and previews of uploaded JPEGs will still be transcoded.

EXIF data — data that reveals more information about the picture, such as when and where it was taken — will still be stripped and discarded as before.

Nolan’s thread has inevitably kick-started a conversation about plans for other image formats and user-requested changes, so Twitter could make itself even morephoto-friendly soon.

Although it seems like a small change, it certainly has the potential to change the way photographers use the platform as compared to Facebook.