Los Angeles — In an attempt to keep its vast audience tempted besides 140 character tweets, popular micro-blogging site twitter continues bulking up the feature set of its previously minimalist site, is rolling out a new feature that highlights the images users post through its site, in a subtle move that could have huge implications for the social network’s competition with rivals Facebook and Google+.
Twitter users can now spice up their profiles with a new “Image Galleries” feature. Now onwards, when you post photos to Twitter via its new photo-uploading tool or through a third-party photo-sharing service, your photos will soon be featured on your Twitter profile in an image gallery.
The company said the new gallery zone will contain of all the images a user has included in his/her Twitter posts using either the site’s native photo uploading application or third-party photo sharing services like yFrog, TwitPic, Instagram and other image sharing services supported in Twitter’s details pane, according to the company.
User Galleries Profile View:
Twitter said user galleries on Twitter accumulates the images that a user has uploaded in his or her Tweets into an orderly page where you can view all of your most recent images. To assemble the initial gallery, Twitter will round up all the images a user has posted since Jan. 1, 2010.
Galleries will display the 100 most-recent images the user has tweeted from supported photo-sharing services, and they will be seamlessly arranged in chronological order. Images can be viewed as medium-size thumbnails on a grid or as smaller thumbnails on a filmstrip with a large version of the latest image displayed below.
User Galleries Grid View:
As the images are collected and organized, all galleries will be available on a user’s profile and highlight a few recent images. To access the galleries, you can go to a user’s profile page. To open the full gallery, click the “View All” button to peep through more images in either a grid view showing image thumbnails or a detail view highlighting the most-recent image and the text of the tweet that was shared along with it.
Besides, users can remove images by simply deleting the tweets that they reside in. Also, it is worth noting that if you copy/paste images from others (retweeting images) they will not be displayed in your gallery if you use the retweet button.
Twitter further mentioned that some images may appear black, and that this occurs when content partners’ servers are overloaded. Also, video thumbnails will not be included, while tweets with video links will not be included in user galleries, it added.
The image gallery marks the first major feature to take advantage of Twitter’s indigenous image-sharing capability, which has only been available since June of this year, and will dramatically change the appearance of Twitter profiles.
Galleries will provide equal billing to images contributed via third-party app makers, but also serve to remind users that Twitter is no longer a place just for 140 characters — it is for photos too. The update is likely designed to tempt Twitter users to add more photos to their tweets.
Galleries, at launch, will be image-only. Twitter Communications Manager Carolyn Penner said in a tweet that users can expect to see the update Monday. “We are rolling out one of my favorite features today: user galleries! View photos an account has shared on Twitter. Sit tight — it is coming soon,” she tweeted.
In addition to this being a major competitive roll out, photos are simply a major part of any social media network. It empowers users a reason to come back, as well as visit individual profiles more. Probably overdue, but this just continues Twitter’s recent trend of making major improvements, which it has been doing pretty much since Jack Dorsey returned to the operations at the company.
Note: User galleries are not yet visible on every Twitter user’s page, as the feature has not been globally released yet.