How To Send A Photoshop File In Twitter

For pictures on your feed, Twitter don't announced to restrict u.s. nearly as much as Facebook does, and then posting a decent quality moving-picture show to a feed should be relatively easy, right? Well, it's trickier than yous might think. This Quick Tip aims to get your JPEGs displayed in the all-time style possible.

Twitter Feed Pictures

Twitter has given us these guidelines:

twitter guidelines — Twitter'due south Guidelines

We're focusing on JPEG in this Quick Tip so all examples are in that format. It would seem that with a 5MB limit nosotros already have a lot more than to play with than Facebook. But is that necessarily the example? A 5MB file might be compressed by Twitter down to the aforementioned every bit a 3MB or a 1MB file with varying states of distortion. So let'southward find out!

I uploaded three versions of my above example to my Twitter Feed; a 3000px (4.2MB) file, a 2000px (2.2MB) file and a 1000px (734kb) file. This is how they came out:

pictures after twitter compression — Pictures afterwards Twitter Compression

I saved each prototype which had been car-resized to 600px by Twitter (you can only relieve the preview merely I could screen capture the full-view version which you encounter in a higher place) and noticed that the file sizes were very interesting.

The 3000px 4.2MB epitome had come out at 47.2kb , the 2000px 2.2MB at 47.5kb and the 1000px 734kb at 52.4kb . So the larger of the images had actually gone down to the smallest size. Interesting when y'all expect at the compression on each. The largest image has some compression artefacts but it's also lost a lot of its sharpness across the whole prototype. The smallest is at present the largest file size, but the compression is very pronounced around the outlines of the people.

Every bit in the instance of Facebook, it seems that larger images fair ameliorate; but not too large. In my own experience, somewhere effectually 1500-2000px is about right and if you can lower the file size with Adobe Photoshop's Salve For Web selection then all the better.

Header Photos

This is my example:

Upload of a High Resolution Image

Firstly I tried this at very high resolution,5000px wide and 8MB – the max Twitter will allow is 10MB.

large resolution twitter header — Large resolution Twitter header

That looked pretty good to me. It's cropped in a little but every bit it was a how-do-you-do-res epitome, that's okay. You tin can run across in that location'south very little visible compression here.

I was pretty smug, until I hit save:

The compression happened after saving the good looking image. You tin can at present see compression around the edges and an overall loss of sharpness

So what if we upload the same thing just after resizing to Twitter's recommended 1500 x 500px?

Upload of Twitter'due south Recommended Size Image

Recommended size for twitter header — Twitter's recommended header size

It's cropped in similar the other did but the compression is nowhere near equally bad. Here are the comparisons adjacent:

comparisons at 100 — Comparisons of a big size and Twitter's recommended size at 100%

You can see the loss of definition in both only the one on the left is far worse, with quite visible distortion, especially effectually the writing on the gunkhole.

What If...

Twitter's guide'south clearly worked ameliorate than a full size paradigm but I wondered; what if I took their size, kept the same ratio but doubled the size. I created a 3000px by 1000px image and tried that:

Twitter header ratio doubled — I tried doubling Twitter's recommendation, 3000 x 1500px

Aha! This looks much better to me; in that location are nevertheless signs of compression but you lot can see from the 100% preview in the corner, the writing on the gunkhole is much clearer and the edges of objects have far less visible artefacting.

Summary

Third political party websites are always going to compress our images, we just have to find the best manner possible of displaying them with these restrictions. Their guidelines are there for a reason but that'due south not to say having a play effectually won't get you lot better results.

Getting the all-time results for feed images

Upload a large(ish) size, ideally betwixt 1500px-2000px
Relieve at maximum quality possible
Reduce the file size with Save For Web

Getting the best results for cover images.

3000px by 1000px worked well for me
It must be nether 10MB
It volition crop in but the results will be far better than resizing to the recommended 1500px past 500px