Display of Twitter excerpts - feature or bug?

[muriel_volestrangler]

I often see tweets that have screen-captured something and embedded it - and it's divided up into 2 or 3 different sections, and magnified by different amounts in the different parts, and made unreadable.

As an example - this is what I see, viewing a tweet directly on the twitter.com website:



Since it happens so often, do they intend it to be like that - an 'edgy' teaser of what was actually screen-captured, that makes you click on it to see if it becomes readable? Or is it just some bug they haven't ironed out in years? I use Windows 7 and Chrome on a laptop, so it's not as if I have an unusual software combination.

[Princess Turandot]

1. The problem is that the way Twitter handles photos doesn't always work that well for text captures..

The images in the timeline version of the tweet are usually clipped, especially in portrait orientation. If someone adds more than one image to the same tweet, Twitter tiles them. If there are two images, they each get half of the image field. If there are more than two, the first image is shown on the left by itself, while the others are stacked on the right:

Link to tweet

In order to see the full images, you need to click on one of the images in the tweet, which opens a larger version of it. Then you can use the arrows on either side of that view to look at larger versions of the images.

The main problem with the tweet you included is that she added two different screen-cap images of text to the tweet, which requires more clipping for tiling purposes in the timeline view. You can see it more clearly in this tweet from her, where two different text captures are side by side. To compound things, she used a large font for the text that was captured, so even less of each text capture shows up in the timeline. (It does make them easier to read in the full tweet view.)

Link to tweet

The shorter answer: more often than not, you do need to open/expand the tweet to see screen-captured text.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Thanks - I suppose it's the amount of automatic clipping that's surprising

It looks like it's a very unintelligent clipping - in the text I gave in the OP, the 2 images were wide, but short from top to bottom, but were made unnecessarily large from top to bottom, and clipped beyond usefulness from side to side. So the clipping algorithm seems to be "2 images - put them side by side, and enlarge them to take up the whole room top to bottom, no matter how much clipping that needs left and right". If they just had something saying "these would fit better one above the other", it'd work a lot better.

Also annoying for this (I'm just venting my frustration at Twitter, which I think is a really lazily designed interface) is that when viewing the tweet on Twitter, the pointer doesn't change when hovering over the image, so there's no indication that a click will get you a different view; and when you do click, they superimpose the text of the tweet on the full-size image, and you have to move the pointer around to get it to go away.