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Twitter Will Finally Stop Making Your Images Look Terrible
At last, the end of sketchy compression
Social media is ruining the internet, but not in the way you think. (Okay, not solely in the way you think.) Every time an image is uploaded to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, it gets compressed, degrading its overall quality. If an image is downloaded and re-uploaded — which happens constantly to memes — the effect grows even more drastic. Eventually, if an image is shared too many times, it can become unreadable. But now, Twitter’s taking a small step toward fixing the problem.
This week, Twitter engineer Nolan O’Brien announced that the site will now “preserve JPEGs as they are encoded for upload on Twitter for Web.” This change basically means when a user uploads a photo, it will be displayed in its full, uncompressed glory. This is a big deal because, for most of the internet, compressing photos means ruining them a little bit. And when every site does the same thing, they get ruined a lot.
This change basically means when a user uploads a photo, it will be displayed in its full, uncompressed glory
Sites like Facebook have to handle tens or even hundreds of millions of photos being uploaded every day. Each one of those photos takes up processing power and bandwidth whenever they show up in someone’s feed. By shaving a tiny bit of data off each photo by compressing them to a smaller size, sites can conserve huge amounts of computing power and bandwidth at scale.
Except compression comes with tradeoffs. The more a photo is compressed, the more detail it loses and it can start looking terrible. For example, in the photo above, the left side has been run through Facebook’s upload compression once. The one on the right is the original, untouched by Facebook’s algorithms. After the compression, hairs and whiskers look blockier, and the picture overall loses detail.
For a single photo, this isn’t a huge deal. But when it comes to memes that get downloaded, re-uploaded, crossposted, screenshotted, uploaded again, and transformed over and over again, that compression can take its toll. Every time someone new uploads the picture, it gets just a little bit worse.
