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…
