Feedback for "Upcoming Changes to PNG Image Support"

[dstaley]

Will this impact images already uploaded to Twitter (for example, avatars)? Or will this only impact images uploaded after the change is implemented?

[aumoras]

The thing about artists posting higher resolution pictures on twitter is that it makes it easier for thieves to repost their artwork and have it printed and sold on say t-shirts etc. It’s not just posting a higher resolution personal picture. Which is usually why they will resize it down to a smaller size without slapping a huge watermark over it at the same time.

[NolanOBrien]

Will this impact images already uploaded to Twitter (for example, avatars)? Or will this only impact images uploaded after the change is implemented?

@dstaley

This is a good question and though I thought it was applied everywhere, I am seeing that the info I am working off of doesn’t specify one way or the other. Let me get back to you on this.

[NolanOBrien]

The thing about artists posting higher resolution pictures on twitter is that it makes it easier for thieves to repost their artwork and have it printed and sold on say t-shirts etc. It’s not just posting a higher resolution personal picture. Which is usually why they will resize it down to a smaller size without slapping a huge watermark over it at the same time.

Thanks for commenting @aumoras

This has come to our attention and we are considering use cases here.

The current suggestions are to use a watermark (which you’ve already mentioned) or to scale up the image (so that each pixel is 4x4 pixels or so) to preserve quality better without giving away something printable.

[NolanOBrien]

Will this impact images already uploaded to Twitter (for example, avatars)? Or will this only impact images uploaded after the change is implemented?

@dstaley

This is a good question and though I thought it was applied everywhere, I am seeing that the info I am working off of doesn’t specify one way or the other. Let me get back to you on this.

@dstaley

Just confirmed this change will apply to all image categories, including avatars. Do you have any follow up questions about that?

[dstaley]

So, just to clarify, this change will be applied retroactively to avatars already uploaded? (Basically do I need to reupload my existing PNG-24 avatar as a palletted PNG-8 avatar to avoid JPEG compression?)

[NolanOBrien]

@dstaley

This will only apply to new image uploads. Legacy avatars will be unchanged. Once the change happens, using a PNG8 avatar is a good idea though if you are able to do so.

[RME]

I’ve confirmed Twitter is using something similar to MozJPEG so that is covered.

Also, I have tested converting two Twitter-JPEGs to WebP without visible quality loss and these are the results:

JPEG is 2x the size of a similar WebP image.

WebP DuFT…	Effort 6, Quality 75	->	281->142kB	49% smaller
WebP DvG9…	Effort 6, Quality 75	->	248->110kB	55% smaller

First image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuFT8cdV4AADLBT.jpg:large
Second image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DvG9fFOU8AI-JIh.jpg:large

Converter tool: https://squoosh.app (App made by Google)

[isaiahodhner]

Twitter will also preserve the PNG image if it maintains a smaller file size than the JPEG version at our own internal metric (basically, we’re going to compare the JPEG file size to the PNG file size and the smaller one is used – but the metric could change to be more sophisticated so we used loose language in our announcement). Using tools like tinypng.com or ImageOptim might help achieve this.

It would be nice if Twitter ran a PNG optimizer on the image, and took the smallest of the resulting PNG and compressed JPEG (perhaps using gzipped sizes since the files would be going over the network).

Further, no-one wants a magic black box that sometimes ruins your art. You should be able to preview exactly how it will show up, and you should be able to control it.

[singer_joseph]

I’m going to be blunt. Don’t try to fix what isn’t broken. Don’t let the bosses make things more complex than they have to be, or more inconvenient for artists. You may not make the roadmap, but you can be a roadblock if you don’t think the map is right.

[JapanYoshi777]

Well, time to link to Imgur and make a thumbnail that says “FULL RES ON IMGUR” for every post.

[castpixel]

@NolanOBrien thanks for engaging. It might be a good idea to provide an override to the default, so users can opt out of compression out of the box. Otherwise it’s just going to be a lot of discontent and every attempt will be made to override or hack the compression. Which will force twitter to patch until it’s unhackable and artists on twitter to leave. My own pixelart content is safe as png8 but I’m still thinking of leaving in solidarity, if enough artists are upset enough to leave.

Also how about adding proper gifs at last? Pixelart absolutely suffers when converted to your video format (stutter when looping, hideous compression artifacts) and it results in larger files. A size test will confirm it every time. I tweeted a dubious and half-working workaround 5 years ago (506px width) and I still get asked about it as if I’m an expert. This isn’t normal

[Darth_Biomech]

So, let me get this straight. You guys claim that you are supporting the artists, while at the same time robbing them of the last option to post content with good quality? At least save the unmodified originals and make them be accessible through the interface or something! Same goes for the gifs. Give us normal gifs!
Yes, I don’t understand why so many artists arrived at twitter when it is supposed to be a platform for posting tiny text messages, that doesn’t sound like art-friendly place. But they’re here now. And this “improvement” is ABSOLUTELY screws them over. And for what? So that some dude could open his feed in 2.15 seconds instead of 3.5 seconds?

[maxst]

What about Animated PNGs?
Please don’t convert them into JPGs.
If you must, convert them into video, like you do with Animated GIFs.
But don’t convert them into JPGs.

[dmitriid]

Don’t forget the absolutely random way Twitter crops images when displaying them in the feed. You never know if it will be the middle of the image displayed, or just the bottom-left corner, or some other part.

[reckingstacks]

Hi, artist here. I just want to throw my hat into the “bad move” pile. This really is a horrible change for artists. I post all of my polished work on Twitter, but I also post unfinished pieces and sketches, and the compression makes these especially ugly. Uploading a higher-res image, in JPEG format, to compensate for this actually results in a file size about three times bigger (in a recent sketch) than the 50%-size PNG format I would usually upload it in, so…

Also, after a quick test just now: when uploading a jpeg and a png of this same image, at the same resolution, with the jpeg at 85% quality and clocking in at about 100kb bigger than the png file size, I’m still seeing compression on both images (not the same amount, as I first thought, but it is distinctly there) once they’ve actually uploaded and posted, so idk what the back-end file-size comparison thing is doing, but something seems wrong here. As I understand it, it should be retaining the png file if the png is smaller than the compressed jpeg?

[DJDavid98]

So let me get this straight, you think having a regular size PNG-24 with great quality is worse than having a 4x upscaled JPEG of the same image? There’s a healthy limit for when limitations like this make sense and this goes right through it. Let artists upload a PNG then see if your 4x upscale method actually reduces the file size compared to the original. I also agree with the others here that having the system decide what’s best for users behind the scenes is about as bad UX as it gets. Let the user know well before posting that their image will lose quality (which is looking like >90% of images uploaded by artists I know). Optimize the images on your end as much as possible before making the users hack around and suffer quality loss. Now that Tumblr shot itself in the foot a great number of artists are flocking to Twitter, are you really sure this is the warmest welcome you could give them? They’ll see this announcement and pack up shop to move to a platform that cares. Maybe try getting that through to the executives.

[citrusui]

Hi.

Are there plans to at least make it possible to access full-sized JPGs/PNGs manually? For example, this online tool allows you to embed secret messages/images into a seemingly random PNG image.

Here’s an example image that outputs Hello World. It’s 4x4 pixels in size, so you may need to zoom in to save it.

This image won’t get compressed by Twitter’s servers, at least I hope, so it should be ok.

And here is another example image that outputs a much larger image with the text “Hello World”:

The second image would be rendered unreadable if converted to JPG, as the data embedded into the picture is literally within the pixels. As you mentioned earlier, many people don’t have the bandwidth to download hi-res images all the time. However, perhaps it would be possible to still host the image at its original size, just not to users on their Twitter’s feeds? (In fact, I do believe it’s something you already do, just not for PNG images. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrbHwt7U8AA6X05.jpg:orig)

Edit: in case this needs clarification, here’s what Bandcamp does for album covers…

Publicly facing image (shown to the user on an album page): https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2631671759_10.jpg

Full-sized image (not shown to the user, but still exists on the server. even if the actual image is not a png, it’s still a good idea to add it so you ensure you get a high quality image): https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2631671759_0.png

[NolanOBrien]

Twitter will also preserve the PNG image if it maintains a smaller file size than the JPEG version at our own internal metric (basically, we’re going to compare the JPEG file size to the PNG file size and the smaller one is used – but the metric could change to be more sophisticated so we used loose language in our announcement). Using tools like tinypng.com or ImageOptim might help achieve this.

It would be nice if Twitter ran a PNG optimizer on the image, and took the smallest of the resulting PNG and compressed JPEG (perhaps using gzipped sizes since the files would be going over the network).

Further, no-one wants a magic black box that sometimes ruins your art. You should be able to preview exactly how it will show up, and you should be able to control it.

Thanks for the reply @isaiahodhner

You’ve made some good comments and I want to respond to each.

It would be nice if Twitter ran a PNG optimizer on the image
This is something we looked at and quickly realized was not feasible at scale. With millions upon millions of images uploaded daily, running a PNG optimizer on our side would take more capacity than we even store at our data centers. The best way to scale PNG optimizing is to push the optimization to pre-upload time and have it be on demand. Not everyone needs to optimize their images so forcing that cost on every user is problematic and even more of a problem is the technical limitations of Web for doing this work – Web is by far the most common platform for providing PNGs since iOS and Android have always automatically converted to JPEG before upload. The identification that tooling to remove the burden from the person posting to make the PNGs more optimal and more likely to be fast enough to deliver globally is a solid recommendation, we will take that back to product for more consideration.

perhaps using gzipped sizes since files would be going over the network
Though it is correct that most content served over the internet is automatically gzipped to reduce its size for transport, media (images, audio and video) do not apply gzip on top. By their very nature, they are already heavily compressed files and applying gzip on top will most often increase the size of the payload. Gzip and most other compression is geared to compressing on redundancy, and something already compressed has inherently already removed redundancy making the value of gzip on top of that less practical. The core underlying issue you are raising is a good one – getting as much information/quality across the internet with the smallest payload possible. We are restricted to PNG and JPEG at this point in time, but we won’t stop evaluating other options as they increase in availability.

…no one wants a black box…should be able to preview…should be able to control it [after the preview]…
This is a really well reasoned point and has been the most consistent feedback. The surprise of the change in the image between upload and viewing it after upload is a problem today and our changes aren’t addressing it. This is something we will bring up with product that the black box approach is something we could be solving in our clients. Having a preview affords much more control for the one posting to make any adjustments at their disposal.

Thank you again for the reply.

[Lahiss]

“We care for artists” really stinks like a bad PR spiel when you are actively fucking us over with this.

I can’t believe that anybody thinks that “Upload in high enough resolution that JPG artifacts won’t show up in thumbnail.” is a real advice you should give.

I have NEVER saved anything as low as 85% quality JPG. It just looks so absolutely terrible that there is no redeeming it.