Twitter has expanded larger image previews on the timeline for users on the web.
The microblogging platform will now show full size images on the web. The platform had started testing the new feature that improves image crops to display bigger images on the timeline on mobile in March and had rolled it out to Android and iOS users in May.
“With this, users on Android and iOS will be able to see the media on their timeline as it appears in the Tweet composer when a user uploads the same. This means that they will see the entire image on their timeline while scrolling rather than the cropped image that needs to be clicked on to expand,” it had said.
It is now rolling out the feature to users on the web.
“This is now available on web! Pic looking good in the Tweet composer? That’s how it will look on the timeline,” Twitter wrote from its official account.
Criticism
These recent changes to how Twitter manages image previews stemmed from the criticism it received last year over bias in its image cropping algorithm (via The Verge)
Twitter, earlier this year, had addressed the criticism and has detailed the research it did on the same.
It had analysed its algorithm for gender and race-based biases and found that its auto-crop algorithm wasn’t quite biased. However, it decided to disable it owing to potential risks.
“We considered the trade-offs between the speed and consistency of automated cropping with the potential risks we saw in this research. One of our conclusions is that not everything on Twitter is a good candidate for an algorithm, and in this case, how to crop an image is a decision best made by people,” it had said in a blog post.
