Twitter has a bunch of big problems, and most of them are easy to identify: free speech issues; rampant harassment on the platform; difficult-to-mitigate abuses by electeds and other officials in positions of power. Thankfully, on Wednesday Twitter announced that it had decided to fix the absolute least of those issues and would immediately begin allowing users to post higher-resolution images on mobile. As someone who also tackles my problems from smallest to largest only to get tired after the small stuff and call it a day without making any meaningful or substantial changes in my life, I have no choice but to stand in solidarity with Twitter’s strategy here.
Effective Wednesday, all Twitter users will now have the option to post and view photos in 4K on iOS and Android. Although users could always view images at resolutions up to 4096 x 4096 on Twitter’s web app, the mobile version had previously limited resolution to a meager 2048 x 2048, making for a grainy, yucky viewing experience.
The news about increased image resolution comes just over a month after Twitter announced that it was retooling the way users could share media on the platform, which included testing on how images appear in the Tweet composer and how they appear in their final form on the timeline. Crucially, this fix was targeting the problematic crop feature that Twitter employs, wherein idiots like me try to post a photo and Twitter algorithmically crops it to within an inch of its life, erasing vital context and forcing me to shamefully delete my own tweet seconds after it’s posted.
There’s still no word on when the auto-crop travesty will be rectified, but the resolution issue can be taken care of immediately, as long as users update their high-quality image preferences in their “data usage” settings of the Twitter app. And while higher-quality images do sound nice in theory, there’s no guarantee that they’ll make my personal tweets suck any less. Seems unfair to me, when you think about it.