How to: post photos on Twitter, including a comparison of Tweetphoto and Twitpic

If you’re even the newest of Twitter users, you’ll have seen people posting photos of stuff going on around them. In fact, it’s one of the most popular uses of the site and can often scoop real news organisations, like in the case of the plane that crashed into the Hudson river.

This guide will show you a few of the options available to you if you’d like to become a ‘citizen journalist’ too, or maybe if you just spot something remarkable happening and want to share it with your friends.

Twitpic
By far the most popular way of uploading pictures to Twitter is a website called Twitpic. It’s very simple – users can log into their site on their PC or mobile phone and upload images. You can then add a short caption, which gets posted to your Twitter feed alongside a link to the image.

Better still, thanks to Twitpic’s API you’ll find that many third party Twitter clients will come with Twitpic support built in, so you won’t even need to go to the website.

Twitxr
The unpronounceable Twitxr is an application for the iPhone and Windows Mobile handsets that’ll let you upload pictures from your mobile phone, publish them on Twitter and varous other social networking and microblogging sites, and automatically add geotagging data from a GPS unit.

It’s also available as a Java application for Nokia S60 and Motorola handsets, and in a worst case scenario you can visit m.twitxr.com to upload a pic or even just email it, attaching the picture.

SnapTweet
If you’re a Flickr user and want your account to be integrated with your Twitter account, then you’ll like SnapTweet. It’s a service that takes your Flickr RSS feed of pictures and then sends a Twitter update out whenever you add anything new.

People who upload to Flickr from their mobile phones on a regular basis will find this a very easy and convenient way of sharing photos on the site, though if you haven’t got a Flickr account, or a capable mobile phone, then it’s a bit of a hassle to set up.

TweetPhoto
Lastly, TweetPhoto is the new kid on the block for image sharing on Twitter. It keeps all the functionality of its main competitor, TwitPic, but adds more info like who’s recently viewed or favourited a photo.

There’s also a prominent option to retweet photos, which should help the virality of the service. It’ll post your photos to Facebook, too, if you’d like it to. From your phone you can either visit the Tweetphoto website to upload pics, or email them to a unique address.

Conclusions
There’s a multitude of options for you to post pictures to Twitter from your mobile phone, so if you see something exciting on the street then you’ve got no excuse not to post it. Let’s not have 80 pictures of your cat, though, yeah?

If you have any incredible shots that you’d like to share with us, then now that you know how to upload them to Twitter, send them our way at @techdigest.