Twitter Change Will Keep JPEG Quality When Uploading

By Shane McGlaun

Twitter fans will be glad to hear the latest from the social network. A Twitter engineer has announced that the company will now preserve JPEGs as they are encoded on Twitter for the web. The only caveat to the announcement is that Twitter doesn’t support EXIF orientation.

This is good news because, in the past, any photos that were uploaded were in a degraded quality. One thing that fans should know is that Twitter will still transcode and compress thumbnails for the images, which is what is seen in a Twitter feed.

If the user clicks through to the image, they will see the full, uncompressed image that was uploaded. Twitter will strip the EXIF data out, that data gives details on when, how, and possibly where a picture was taken.

This move will be something that photography pros and enthusiasts appreciate. The change is live now.