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Twitter improving photo upload quality and investing in open standard social network experiment

Twitter has announced today that users uploading images via the web will now see JPEG quality preserved. Separately, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey shared that the company is building a small team of open-source architects, engineers, and designers to create an “open and decentralized standard” that Twitter could be based on in the future.

Uploading images to social media usually results in loss of quality and Twitter has made a change today that will see JPEG quality retained when sharing photos via Twitter for the web.

Twitter’s senior staff software engineer, Nolan O’Brien shared more details on the update today in a tweet, explaining that the image encoding is preserved at 97% quality (via TechCrunch). O’Brien also notes that EXIF data will be still be stripped.

Keep in mind this update is only rolled out to Twitter for Web, so you won’t see the same on Twitter’s iOS app or third-party clients for now.

O’Brien further clarified that bitmap encoding is retained while metadata is not. He also shared that there will still be image limits but that they are “very generous” and “pretty much any 8 megapixel photo will be preserved and even up to 16 megapixels can be preserved (in square aspect ratio).”

In other Twitter news today, CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted this morning about the company creating a new team to work on “an open and decentralized standard for social media.”

While vague, he said “The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.”

He went on to explain in another tweet that the team is called “bluesky” and is headed up by Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal.

He noted they are hiring for the team and the project would take “many years.”

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Avatar for Michael Potuck Michael Potuck

Michael is an editor for 9to5Mac. Since joining in 2016 he has written more than 3,000 articles including breaking news, reviews, and detailed comparisons and tutorials.