Starting today, Twitter will preserve JPEGs as they are encoded for upload on Twitter for Web. (Caveat, cannot have EXIF orientation)



For example: the attached photo is actually a guetzli encoded JPEG at 97% quality with no chroma subsampling.https://t.co/1u37vTopkY pic.twitter.com/Eyq67nfM0E — Nolan O'Brien (@NolanOBrien) December 11, 2019

Nolan shared an example photo, and the results are pretty impressive, although you'll only see the full impact once you click through to an image (providing it's a JPEG) -- thumbnails and previews will still be transcoded. EXIF data -- data that reveals more information about the picture, such as when and where it was taken -- will still be stripped and discarded as before.

It's a small change that has the potential to make a big difference to the way photographers view and use the platform. Nolan's thread has inevitably kick-started a conversation about plans for other image formats and user-requested changes, so Twitter could make itself even more photo-friendly soon.