david chan's blog

One of the things I love doing on my iPhone is to capture and share candid moments in my life.  And there’s probably no better way to broadcast novel messages than with Twitter.

There are a lot of ways of getting pictures on Twitter with the iPhone, and I’ll list several here.  Each of the methods I’ve tried have their pros and cons, and I’m uploading via 3G, and not wifi.

1. Twitterific

The first method is via the app Twitterific (free ad-supported version, downloaded from app store).  To attach an image onto a tweet, simply press the “camera” icon, and you will have the option of taking a picture.  The image upload doesn’t take too long (around 15-20 seconds).  Here’s a screenshot of the image quality:

To date, all of my images uploaded this way have been rotated sideways.  The image quality is average but still very decent.

2. Twittelator

Twittelator is another iPhone app found in the App Store.  Like Twitterific, it is free, but does not have any ads.  The camera icon makes a familiar return in the create tweet screen in Twittelator, and pressing on it will give you the option of selecting a picture to upload or taking a new picture.  The image upload time was very fast.  Here’s a screenshot of an uploaded image:

Here, the image has been cropped, and that some of it has been cut off.  This image size isn’t acceptable for me as it’s hard to tell which parts will be cropped when you’re taking and uploading a picture in the wild.

3. Email picture to TwitPic

The third method doesn’t require an app – just a setting on TwitPic.  Goto the TwitPic website and login with your Twitter credentials and you should see some new options in the top navigation.  Enter the settings screen and you will get to see your private email address for uploading images to TwitPic.  I’m going to assume everyone knows how to email photos from the iPhone, and there doesn’t need to be text in the body to upload your photo.  The subject line of the email becomes your tweet, and your post will appear in Twitter anywhere between 1-5 minutes.  Uploading an image with this method on 3G takes quite a while (30 seconds to 1 minute), and you’ll probably want to refrain from doing anything which might stop the uploading.  Here’s a screenshot of the uploaded image:

The long upload time is offset by the great image quality and (relatively) high resolution of the picture.

For the most part, Twitterific has the best balance between upload time and image quality.  The rotated picture is definitely a setback, but I’m sure Iconfactory will look into that issue.  Emailing to TwitPic directly is probably the best way to go if you want quality, and currently that is my method of choice for uploading images to Twitter.

Update: July 27

I’ve recently started using Posterous as an alternative to emailing to TwitPic directly.  Posterous is basically a blog you update via email, and any media attached to the email message gets embedded into your post.  Although Posterous is a standalone (micro) blogging platform, it does integrate with Twitter, and any posts you create in Posterous gets tweeted.  I’ll spare you any of the signup details (as it’s actually quick and quite painless), and go right into the image quality.

Mousing over the file will give the above tool tip, letting users know that they can view the full size of that image.  Of course, the “full size” is the shrunken down version of the original, done automatically by the iPhone Mail.app, but it’s still nice to be able to get an even larger image.  Image upload time was decent, from around 25-35 seconds on 3G.  As a bonus, Posterous sends you an email when the upload is complete, letting you know if the upload was successful.  Great feature for Roger’s quirky 3G network (though some people might find confirmation emails annoying).

I was a loyal fan of uploading images directly to TwitPic, but as it stands, Posterous is slightly faster and offers a few nicer features, and leaves me wondering if there’s a need to use Twitter clients to send pictures at all.