This Major Twitter Crop Update Makes It So Easy To Share Pictures On The App

If you've scrolled through Twitter recently, you may have noticed something majorly different in your feed. Photos are looking taller than ever without the need to tap on a tweet. Yep, Twitter crop is gone, meaning you no longer have to play a guessing game when you scroll to a tweet with an embedded picture. As with all good things, there is a catch. Here's everything you need to know about Twitter ditching cropped photos on the app.

You've probably experienced the dreaded Twitter photo crop since you first started tweeting. Before the May 5 update, when uploading a vertical photo on the Twitter app, it would crop the image into a square shape for the timeline that often left out some key parts of the photo. To see the full image, you'd have to tap or click on the tweet. In March 2021, Twitter began a test that let a small group users post photos without cropping it. According to a Twitter spokesperson, the company tested getting rid of cropped photos on the app because of user feedback that the cropping algorithm wasn't equitable. Additionally, users often complained that photo crop would leave the most important part of the image out, like cropping someone's face or head.

After a successful test, the company announced the end of Twitter crop on the app on May 5. "No bird too tall, no crop too short," the company wrote in a tweet alongside two photos of a white bird with an enormously long neck, which appears to be a Great Egret. The first photo had the OG Twitter crop, which left out the bird's head, while the updated image shows the entire photo. "Introducing bigger and better images on iOS and Android, now available to everyone," the tweet shared. This means when you post a vertically oriented picture in the Twitter app on your iOS or Android device, you won't see it cropped to a square shape as you did in the past.

It's important to note that the images need to be a standard aspect ratio, which Twitter Support clarified is either a 2:1 and 4:3 ratio, to appear full size. If images are still very wide or tall (in a non-standard aspect ratio), they will receive a center crop by default.

If you were hoping to say goodbye to Twitter crop on the site itself, I'm sorry to inform you the change doesn't apply to Twitter on desktop. So, images will still be cropped when you scroll through the Twitter website, and you'll have to click on the tweet to see the photo in full. As of publication, there is no specific date Twitter crop will change for desktop users.

After users began noticing that the Twitter crop was gone on their iPhone and Android apps, they started celebrating by tweeting about the change.

Twitter first began supporting photos on its desktop site in 2011, but they only appeared as a link. Since then, Twitter has implemented a few algorithms for sharing photos on the site and in the app, all of which cropped the image and clearly frustrated users. With the new update, the cropped pictures are finally off the app for good.

The only thing left to do is enjoy the un-cropped pictures as you scroll and post your own full-length image to celebrate the removal of Twitter crop in the app.