Twitter Stops Cropping Photos and Artists Rejoice

In a rare move of doing things that the users want, Twitter has changed the way that it crops photos on mobile so that the tops of photos aren’t cut off.

Why this only just happened is a mystery to me, given that phones are oriented hot dog style rather than hamburger style, but last night Twitter announced the change to much fanfare from users.

Previously, the way that Twitter cropped images would cut parts of the image off. Users didn’t have a choice in how images were cropped, so you could end up with image previews that were sometimes hilarious and sometimes and sometimes exhibited the problems with AI bias. Twitter will still resize images that are particularly large, but the change does mean that you can post this very large hat and have it be more recognizable in context:

When the change was announced yesterday, almost immediately “Twitter crop is gone,” started trending. To celebrate, people started posting all their long photos, which can now live unconstrained online.

The change is particularly good for artists, who have had to guess how their works would be cropped by Twitter’s algorithm.

The change to how Twitter crops images does mean the loss of one of Twitter’s favorite jokes, in which the hidden part of the cropped image would feature something shocking or hilarious. That seems like a fair exchange for Twitter doing something to their platform that actually makes sense.