New York — Barely two months back, the micro blogging giant Twitter has unleashed its own picture-posting service, so users can upload photos directly through the company’s website without going through a separate service. On Thursday, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the rollout is now complete for all U.S. and international users on Twitter.com, according to VentureBeat reports.
The photo-sharing service, which was unleashed in early June, which is powered by Photobucket, empowers users to add and upload images instantly to their tweets through the micro blogging platform’s website without going through a separate service. Now the capabilities to upload photos is being rolled out to all users yesterday.
When users sign into the Web version of Twitter, they will be welcomed with a a camera icon on the bottom of the “What’s Happening?” messaging box to choose a photo to upload. Clicking it will let users select a picture to upload, which they can then preview before sending it to the world.
The images are themselves hosted by Photobucket, but the service is now incorporated into Twitter’s main interface. Photos will be displayed in a tweet as ‘pic.twitter.com/xxxxxx’. Twitter has assigned a 3MB limit on the size of photos and when the tweets are clicked, the images will appear as thumbnails in the right sidebar; clicking the links themselves will bring up a new Twitter-branded tab with the picture and the tweet for context.
Moreover, adding an image to a tweet is now so streamlined that simply clicking inside the tweet-composing text field, you will see a small camera icon below the field next to a small location icon become activated. Click the camera icon to upload your image, then compose and send your tweet.
Besides, users also have the ability to add the pictures to Twitter’s search function by affixing hashtags to the tweet. Users can also comment on photos by simply replying to the tweet containing the photo link. At present, only Web users can reap the benefits of photo uploading. Also, many popular third-party photo upload services that are frequently used alongside Twitter, such as Twitpic, Flickr and yFrog will continue to be supported by the social network, Twitter said in a guide to the new service.
Originally when the service was unfurled in June, it was speculated whether Twitter’s new photo sharing service might hurt or potentially even kill off photo- and video-sharing services such as yFrog and TwitPic.
Pondering over privacy, the guide also explained that EXIF data is removed from photos when they are uploaded, and photos can be cut off from public viewing if the tweet carrying the photo URL is deleted — however, Twitter did note that such shots “may still be cached in some browsers and servers”.
Twitter also mentioned in the guide that it would be rolling out media galleries in the coming weeks, displaying all pictures contributed by a user on the network. These will include pic.twitter.com images, as well as those from other services such as Twitpic.
Third-party developers will get access to Twitter’s new image upload API “shortly after we have rolled out the feature to all users”, the guide concluded.
Twitter had yet to add support for the mobile version of Twitter, although iPhone users will be able to send photos to Twitter through the photo application after the next, major iOS update. Apple’s new mobile OS prominently features Twitter integration, essentially making it the default social network for iOS users.
Twitter’s deep concentration on creating consumer-friendly, visually appealing products has certainly paid off. Also under the wraps, Twitter is going to provide support for photo galleries designed to gather and syndicate all photos that a user has uploaded on Twitter and third party services like TwitPic.