Twitter is testing a new way to give photos, videos, and GIFs more breathing room on your timeline.
Still in the research-and-development phase, edge-to-edge posts (currently only for iOS) span the width of your screen, giving visual content “more room to shine,” the Twitter Support team said.
Currently, images, videos, and GIFs are automatically shrunk to fit the dimensions of timeline text, leaving blank space on either side. Space that this update aims to fill.
Assuming the feature eventually rolls out more widely, users won’t need to tap anymore to make media fill the screen. It’s unclear whether links with pictures will also get the full-width treatment; based on the image above, provided by Twitter, it appears advertisements will.
An increasingly visual social network, Twitter is racing to keep up with the likes of Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, which rely heavily on photos and videos to communicate. There is no word on when (or if) this new feature will reach Android and web testers, or leave the experimental stage.
The firm in May launched uncropped, larger images in users’ feeds in an attempt to address flaws in its neural network, which automatically adjusted photos to favor faces that are “slim, young, of light or warm skin color and smooth skin texture, and with stereotypical feminine facial traits.”
