Twitter now keeps the image quality of JPEGs uploaded to the platform

Twitter is changing the way it processes images uploaded to the platform to maintain the quality of a JPEG.

Nolan O’Brien, one of the social media giant’s engineers, shared a tweet outlining that the platform will preserve uploaded JPEG by no longer transcoding them. Twitter used to previously transcode images, which compresses them and would reduce the quality of images.

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

However, the platform will still compress images for thumbnails that seen in the Twitter feed. Once users click on the image, they will then see the full uncompressed image if it’s a JPEG.

Twitter is also going to strip EXIF data, which includes information about the image such when it was taken or edited. The data is being stripped to prevent peoples’ location data from being available to others.

This small but great feature is a welcome addition to the platform and takes it a step towards becoming a more photo-friendly app.

Source: @NolanOBrien, TechCrunch