What is the behavior going to be for uploaded WebP images? Twitter for Web has been updated (Dec 10, 2019) to preserve a JPEG as encoded if: 1) the image is 4096x4096 or smaller, 2) 5MBs or less, 3) doesn’t have an orientation set that would rotate the image and 4) has a compression ratio of at least 1 pixel per byte. JPEGs will be transcoded to 85% JFIF quality with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. Uploaded JPEG images will remain in JPEG format. What is the behavior going to be for uploaded JPEG images? These changes will be applied to all images uploaded to Twitter. What image categories are going to be impacted? To better support the needs of the global internet user base and fix what is currently broken for them, these changes are being made to reduce the impact that PNGs have on Twitter users and the internet. When a Tweet has unlimited reach, the impact of that reach needs more consideration for platforms that need to scale like Twitter does. This is the core feature that Twitter provides. The open nature of Twitter as a platform means any Tweet can reach any person in the world. On a wider scale, many users loading large PNG images on the same constrained networks will collectively add to bandwidth congestion on the network for all internet users, regardless of what apps they are using. An isolated user loading a PNG will have to have their DMs and timeline and other features of Twitter compete with the PNG. PNGs also take up bandwidth and slow everything else down. The side effect of these PNGs being so large isn’t just that they load slowly. Waiting over 30 seconds is not uncommon and users either see a timeout or give up waiting. The time to load a PNG vs a JPEG is maybe a few seconds where users can depend on reliable fast internet, but for most of the world it is many seconds of waiting. PNG images are most often between 6 and 9 times larger than their JPEG counterparts. One of the impacts of serving PNG images globally is that this majority internet user base are faced with large file downloads whenever they cross a Tweet with an embedded PNG, or even multiple PNGs. The majority of people on the internet face constrained internet speeds, something that is entirely out of their control. In the world of people wanting to participate on the internet, many can only access the internet at 2G speeds, and another large portion have slow or unreliable internet. The reason for these changes is due to supporting a global audience. The changes we’re making will provide consistent behavior that can be depended on by those uploading images to Twitter to reach a global audience by reducing how many PNG images are served on Twitter. The way Twitter handled PNG uploads in the past was not always consistent and could lead to large PNG images being used when a JPEG would have been preferable for image load latency and user data costs. Starting February 11th, we are going to extend this effort to better support users globally with how we handle uploaded images, with a focus on how we handle PNG images. Over the years, we’ve made improvements to our image pipeline moving towards faster load times while improving quality within reasonable constraints. Historically, Twitter has supported JPEG and PNG format images.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |