Twitter has just announced that it is rolling out a server-side update that will allow users to upload 4K images from their Android and iOS phones. The current version of both apps only allows for uploading 2K images. Before the update users who wanted to share higher resolution images with their followers had to do it via their computers or laptops.
To start uploading higher resolution images from your phone, follow these steps:
- Go to Settings and privacy.
- Select Data Usage.
- Go into High-quality image uploads.
- Set the option to Mobile data & Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi only from the default, i.e., Never.
Have a collection of higher res photos waiting to be shared? We’re testing ways for you to upload and view 4K images on Android and iOS.
If you're in the test, update your high-quality image preferences in “Data usage” settings to get started. pic.twitter.com/EgW5fsb8Z8
— Support (@Support) March 10, 2021
This will prevent the app from compressing images before uploading them. However, note that even though this will increase the resolution of the image, it will also increase the upload file size and the time it takes to upload the file.
While uploading, the app does compress the size of the image a little but maintains the resolution. Twitter’s web version, on the other hand, maintains both the resolution and file size providing a loss-less upload. Hence the image looks better than the one uploaded from the phone.
Since most phones do not capture images with such high resolution, the uploads will mostly be lossless. However, by activating high-quality image upload, the images will be uploaded in a higher-resolution as compared to before the update.
Now testing on Android and iOS: when you Tweet a single image, how the image appears in the Tweet composer is how it will look on the timeline –– bigger and better. pic.twitter.com/izI5S9VRdX
— Support (@Support) March 10, 2021
In addition to this, Twitter has also changed how images appear on your timeline. Previously, the default preview was always landscape regardless of what the image orientation was. For this Twitter used machine learning algorithms to generate an appropriate preview image that placed the subject in the window. With the new update, the app will now show the full image on the timeline.
The video quality, on the other hand, is still abysmal. It tops out at 720p and uses extremely aggressive compression. We are unsure if the platform is working on that.