Twitter 'crop', sometimes relished and sometimes reviled, is now gone.
The social media platform, all these days, would automatically crop uploaded images, unilaterally changing the aspect ratio based on whatever was uplinked by the user.
Twitter has now thrown that system out. Users can now upload images on their Twitter timeline and there won't be any automatic cropping. What they upload with their iOS or Android device is what they and you see.
Further, users can also preview a pic before uploading it.
It may be recalled that Twitter recently allowed some users the option to upload images in 4K quality.
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'Open for surprise' brigade may rue the change
"No bird too tall, no crop too short. Introducing bigger and better images on iOS and Android, now available to everyone," Twitter said in an official tweet announcing the new tweak.
The Twitter image crop had its fans and critics. Those who hated it were mostly artists and photographers, who were cut up by the, well, cut up images. Many felt that their works were misrepresented or disfigured on the timeline.
And then there was also the controversy over alleged 'racist bias' in Twitter image cropping. Twitter had to apologise after it was found that the image crop automatically focused on white faces over black ones (see the embedded tweet).
Trying a horrible experiment...Which will the Twitter algorithm pick: Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama? pic.twitter.com/bR1GRyCkiaSeptember 19, 2020
While many artists welcomed the Twitter tweak to take away image crop, there was also a section that rued the fact that a popular trend on twitter 'open for surprise' is now practically eliminated. The 'open for surprise' memes played on what Twitter timeline showed and what it hid.
But apparently, Twitter's web client still crops image. So the purveyors of 'open for surprise' can move there.
