Twitter tests new image options that could be open to abuse

By Ewdison Then/

As a primarily text-based social network, Twitter's multimedia support sometimes feels almost tacked on instead of an integral part of the system. The social network giant has recently been putting its focus on videos in Fleets and audio in Spaces and Voice DMs but it has unfortunately left simple images lagging behind. Twitter has announced new experiments in testing that could upgrade that experience but open up the platform to some misuse of those features.

Twitter has always had an image cropping problem, something that has long irked artists and creatives using the platform. While you would see the full image while previewing it before uploading and when you tap on the image after being posted, timelines will only show a cropped portion of the full image. What portion gets cropped out and which gets shown has always been a subject of speculation and arguments over the Internet.

Twitter now says it will no longer be cropping photos and what you see in the Tweet composer preview is what you will see in your timelines. If you uploaded a rather tall photo and it shows up in the composer preview as a tall photo, then Twitter says that it will be in its full glory on the timeline as well.

Unsurprisingly, that news was welcome not only with relief but also with challenges to the integrity of that new feature. Some users have tried to upload extremely tall photos that would have probably taken ages to scroll through. Nice try, Twitter says. The test is being applied only to images with standard aspect ratios and it will probably try to keep it that way to prevent people from gaming the system.

Twitter is also testing the ability to upload 4K images, depending on your Internet connection settings. Both these features are still in their testing phase and available only on Android and iOS. It remains to be seen if they will end up becoming standard features or scrapped after getting abused.

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