Twitter’s auto-cropping can be a pain to work with, especially when it cuts out the goods bits of your artwork.
Make your tweets stand out the way you want. Here’s how to beat Twitter’s image cropping when posting your art to Twitter.
Aspect Ratio and Cropping Explained
How your artwork appears on Twitter depends on its aspect ratio.
Aspect ratio is the relationship between the length and height of an image.
Is there a best aspect ratio? Not really. You might want a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio for landscape art, or you might want to work in a specific ratio that will look good on Twitter. It’ll depend on your goals.
For digital art, aspect ratio is usually determined by pixels.
Because Twitter is on different devices, it needs to account for different screen sizes. If your image aspect ratio doesn’t match Twitter’s prescribed aspect ratio, they’ll crop your image preview.
Twitter Image Ratio Guides
Here are the aspect ratio Twitter uses:
Single Image Tweets
Two Image Tweet
Three Image Tweet
Four Image Tweet
Best Practices
Test Your Tweets
You can see how Twitter will crop your images by dropping them into a tweet. The preview matches how it will appear cropped on your timeline.
Both pc and mobile Twitter use the same cropping ratio.
Optimize with close-ups
This is helpful if you have a vertical artwork that won’t look good in a single image tweet.
Add one or two close-up shots according to the ratio guide, so all the images look good together.
Some more examples:
Edit or Crop with Photoshop First
Putting together a promotion or graphic work? You can set your canvas’s aspect ratio so you don’t need to worry about it later.
In your tool panel, choose the crop tool.
At the top, click the drop-down and choose ratio, allowing you to set your own.
Let’s say I wanted to make a single image tweet promoting some christmas stickers. I’d set the ratio to 16:9 before working on it.
Looks great, and matches the twitter auto-crop for single images. Perfect.
Can’t crop? Predict the ratios for a cleaner preview
Now that you know the aspect ratios, you can choose where to put specific images.
Try to keep the main action visible, so it’s more likely to get retweeted.
For example:
What if your artwork doesn’t match the aspect ratio?
It seems like Twitter tends to keep the upward portion of the image (featuring the face or text).
You can use this to your advantage, making the bottom part of the artwork a surprise.
Conclusion
And that’s how to work with Twitter’s automatic cropping system!
It might be annoying, but knowing the ratios will help you make a gallery that’s pleasant to look at.
Plus, people are more likely to retweet if your images are shown in full. Use it to your advantage!
Beat Twitter's auto-cropping and make sure your artwork looks its best with these best practices! Click To TweetKnow a friend who could use the guide? Share the post and help their art stand out.
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