Social Media Managers Take Note! Twitter Is About To Change Its Support for PNG Images

Twitter has always been good with images, but they are going to be changing the way they approach images to some extent at least when it comes to PNG files. Basically, Twitter is optimizing the way it handles PNG images so that they can uploaded more smoothly to the site without having to worry about the kind of lags that are often associated with the format. Uploading PNGs also often resulted in unnecessary data usage because of the fact that the compression that was occurring during the uploading process was not nearly good enough to prevent excess data consumption

"Starting February 11th, we are going to extend this effort to better support users globally with how we handle uploaded images, with a focus on how we handle PNG images.", announced Twitter team in a developer forum page. Adding further, "The reason for these changes is due to supporting a global audience. In the world of people wanting to participate on the internet, many can only access the internet at 2G speeds, and another large portion have slow or unreliable internet. PNG images are most often between 6 and 9 times larger than their JPEG counterparts. The time to load a PNG vs a JPEG is maybe a few seconds where users can depend on reliable fast internet, but for most of the world it is many seconds of waiting. Waiting over 30 seconds is not uncommon and users either see a timeout or give up waiting."

Basically what is going to happen is that a lot of the PNG images that are being uploaded to the social network might end up getting converted to JPEGs. This is probably because JPEG photos tend to take up a lot less space, thereby making it easier for the system to handle them and a lot less data ends up getting consumed in the process as well. Tech companies often have to end up rationing the data that they are using, so there is definitely something to be gained from this kind of process.

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This does not mean that all of the PNGs that you are uploading to Twitter are going to end up being turned into JPEGs. There will be an algorithm that decides whether or not the conversion process occurs, thereby making it easier for you to ascertain whether or not your image will be downgraded in quality once you have uploaded it to the site.

This chart illustrates the 5 types of PNG file format and what Twitter does when they are uploaded:



This should make Twitter’s various web pages load a bit faster as well which is another thing that has needed to improve on the social media platform for quite some time. This is a welcome change that makes the platform better.

Read next: The 2019 Social Media Image Optimization Guide [Infographic]

Featured Photo: Guillaume Payen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images