Twitter adds photo tagging in tweets – plus share up to four photos per tweet

27 Mar 2014

Twitter has overhauled its photo-sharing capabilities, making the process infinitely more sociable by allowing users to tag people in photos and also include up to four photos per tweet.

“Tagging people in a picture makes conversations around photos fun and easy,” explained Twitter software engineer César Puerta in the Twitter blog.

“And tagging doesn’t affect character count in the Tweet — you can tag up to 10 people in a photo and still have all 140 characters at your disposal, making it easier to connect with your friends. If you’re the one being tagged, you’ll get a notification.”

The ability to share up to four photos in a single tweet is a step forward but the added benefit is the new update automatically creates a collage of the photos within the tweet.

“The ability to upload multiple photos is starting to roll out today on iPhone, and is coming soon to Android and twitter.com. Whether you’re on iPhone, Android or twitter.com, you can view Tweets with multiple photos,” Puerta explained.

“Additionally, both photo-tagging and Tweets with multiple photos will display in Embedded Tweets.”

To get these new features, download the latest iPhone and Android app.

Sharing is caring

It has also emerged that significant changes are afoot in terms of the overall structure of Twitter’s sharing mechanisms.

Rumours have abounded in the past week that Twitter is on a mission to make itself easier to use that may have implications for the @ and hashtag functions.

In some cases users hae been reporting that the retweet button inside their iOS app has become a ‘share’ button or ‘add comment’ to the shared item.

The moves are very reminiscent of Facebook and again could be seen as an effort by Twitter to simplify itself and attract more users to grow beyond its 241m active user base.

In recent weeks Twitter began rolling out ‘single click’ video play – inline video – for Android and iPhone devices in a move to drive more revenue from TV networks and video creators.

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John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com