Twitter testing full-width photos, videos in timeline
Twitter testing full-width photos, videos in timeline
(Web Desk) – Twitter is exploring ways to build a more visually immersive experience with its latest test, which brings edge-to-edge tweets to the app on iOS.
BBC reported that Twitter is testing new changes to how photos and videos appear on its apps, closer to how images appear on other services such as Instagram.
Full-width images and videos track for the direction the company has shown some interest in going lately. Twitter introduced bigger images with improved cropping controls for its pair of mobile apps earlier this year, making plenty of photographers and other visual artists happy that the social network was suddenly a much friendlier platform for sharing their work.
The new feature will expand visual media embedded in tweets to fill the whole width of a mobile phone s screen.
Currently, images are indented next to a user s profile photo and take up much less screen space.
Twitter said the new layout - being tested on iOS but not Android - would give media "more room to shine".
Twitter first tested the bigger photos and improved image previews in March before rolling them out broadly two months later, a short timeline we could see again if the test product sticks.
Now testing on iOS:
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 7, 2021
In the current test, tweets fill the full frame from left to right instead of being offset by a pretty large margin on the left. The changes result in much larger images and videos that look better in the feed and a cleaner, more modern design that doesn’t unnecessarily squish tweets to the right of users’ profile pictures.
We re making it easier to be the curator of your own followers list. Now testing on web: remove a follower without blocking them.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 7, 2021
In testing the feature, Twitter says that it wants to encourage users to have conversations across photos and videos, rather than focusing solely on text like the platform traditionally has. While the result looks like a win to us, any change to Twitter’s design is likely to inspire a vocal subset of users to hate-tweet about it for a day or so before forgetting the changes altogether.
