One thing Twitter users collectively hate is the way the platform crops out the images you tweet, sometimes even completely hiding the subject in the image, which ultimately spawned memes such as “open for surprise.”
Hoping to better cater to artists and creatives, Twitter is finally looking into these issues, testing out better image previews on its feed, along with reducing the number of cropped photos.
Announcing the test run, the social media platform’s Chief Design Officer Dantley Davis posted a series of tweets explaining that a small group of both iOS and Android users will be invited to try out a series of new features. To begin with, single-image tweets they see on their timelines that have been posted in standard aspect ratios will no longer be cropped, and they’ll also be able to see exactly how an image will look like within the composer tool. Previews of photos with aspect ratios that are either really tall or wide will remain center-cropped, however.
Additionally, users will also be allowed to upload and view 4k images on their phones, which comes useful for many visual creatives. “With this test, we hope to learn if this new approach is better and what changes we need to make to provide a “what you see is what you get” experience for Tweets with images,” says Davis.