Twitter Rolls Out Longer Image Previews

Twitter is used for many things and despite not being as image-centric as Instagram, some artists and photographers still use the platform to show off their stuff. That's despite how Twitter's image processing has long been a gripe among artists, from its low-res requirements to its unpredictable cropping. In the past few weeks, Twitter has addressed both those and its latest gift is to no longer crop most images, though abusers won't be able to get away with gaming that new system.

Twitter has always cropped tall images to fit certain and honestly arbitrary requirements. That wouldn't be bad if users could actually control which part was actually cropped. For creatives, this meant that artwork or photos might sometimes show the least interesting part of what they wanted to put on display.

Now most users won't have to worry about that because Twitter will now show most images in full in a tweet's preview. That said, the one important caveat is that only images with 2:1 or 3:4 aspect ratios will be displayed completely in previews. Anything beyond that will still be cropped.

This is an important detail because it prevents the abuse that many fear would happen once Twitter rolled out this feature. Extremely tall images, like those designed to really make you scroll a lot to get to the "joke" of the picture, will still be cropped. The only way you'll see it in full is if you actually click or tap on the image to open it.

This full image preview feature comes on the heels of Twitter rolling out support for uploading 4K images, at least on its mobile apps. Both these new features seem to be designed to cater to artists and photographers in particular, which is probably only fair since its previous new retweeting mechanism, which it eventually rolled back after some backlash, put that same group of users at a disadvantage.