Over the last few months, Twitter has been rolling out some key new enhancements to their user experience, adding improved search functionality and the ability to upload images right from a user’s Twitter stream. The photo upgrade came thanks to Photobucket hosting and appeared as a pic.twitter link and image for a user’s followers, as we reported in June and again two weeks ago, when the feature was officially available to a full 100 percent of Twitter users.
Today, Twitter keeps the photo updates rolling, by adding image galleries to the everyday Twitter user experience. Huzzah! According to Twitter’s new support page, these user image galleries will collect the 100 most recent images a user has uploaded into his or her Tweet stream over the course of their recent Twittering careers, organizing them all on a single page, and displaying them in chronological order.
“The images included in user galleries can come from Twitter, yFrog, TwitPic, Instagram and other image sharing services supported in Twitter’s details pane”, Twitter said via its Help Center. Twitterers are likely going to appreciate this feature, as it means that users no longer have to click over to a third party photo sharing app to browse through a friend’s Twit pics. This new feature also serves Twitter well in its pursuit of a stickier user experience. Keeping users on the site for all of their photo sharing needs will no doubt be great for Twitter’s stats, and a welcome addition for users.
As to the technical limitations of the image galleries, display (as mentioned before) will include a user’s 100 most recent images, and, unfortunately, video thumbnails will not be included, nor will Tweets with video links. What’s more, Tweets with images that were sent before January 1, 2010 will not be included in image galleries.
For those looking for the new user galleries, they can be found on your profile page. According to Twitter’s Help Center, clicking “view all” will open the user gallery in the current window. Two different viewing options are included, being grid view and detail view, with the former being self explanatory and the latter showing the user the most recent image, “complete with the body of the Tweet displayed below it and thumbnails for other images above it”, Twitter said.
Personally, it’s hard for me to believe that Twitter is just rolling out this feature in August 2011, but that being said, I’m glad it’s here. It’ll be nice to have the same photo viewing option above “similar to you” that we have on Facebook above our wall feeds.
For those not seeing the new photo option in your user profile yet, have patience, the image galleries should be popping up within the next 24 hours, if they haven’t already. I’m not seeing galleries yet on the web client or on Twitter’s desktop app for Mac, but I’m sure they’ll be surfacing soon. After all, we’ve waited a few years for this, what’s a few more hours?
Images courtesy of the Twitter’s support page.