Twitter is dropping the crop on web. This is the same update that banished Twitter’s awkward auto-cropping algorithm on its Android and iOS apps, which means that you’ll see images in their entirety on your timeline as you scroll through Twitter on your web browser.
This is now available on web!
Pic looking good in the Tweet composer? That’s how it will look on the timeline.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 10, 2021
The same goes for when you post images of your own; you’ll see an accurate preview of your image that doesn’t appear oddly formatted when you post it. The platform touts its full-size preview window as a “what you see is what you get” look at your post.
The ongoing changes to Twitter’s handling of photos stem from last year’s auto-crop controversy. Some users noticed that Twitter’s auto-cropping algorithm may favor white faces over Black faces, resulting in a crop that shows white faces more prominently. Twitter looked into the issue and found that its auto-crop algorithm wasn’t very biased but still disabled it just in case.
Whether Twitter’s auto-crop feature was biased or not, I think we can all agree that we’re better off now that it’s gone for good. This means we’ll no longer miss out on interesting images because we were too lazy to click past the preview. I still might miss the awkwardly cropped images, though (as long as they’re not my own).
