Twitter Now Supports Photos, Videos And Gifs In Retweets

Twitter's quote tweet functionality has been limited to only supporting text, until now. With a drum roll, twitter has introduced an update that is likely going to add a lot to its core experience. For devoted users of the site, the days of waiting to retweet with GIF comments are finally over.

Twitter now lets users express themselves in retweets with photos, videos or GIFs, a feature quite handy for situations when simple words can't get the message across. Users on iOS, Android and mobile browsers can make use of this feature right now with support for web coming in a few months.

Today we are introducing an update you’ve been waiting for — drum roll please — Retweet with GIF, photos, and video! 🎉  Read on to get the behind-the-scenes process of why and how we designed this feature.

The development of this feature involved collaboration between multiple teams. "Teamwork and collaboration are a huge part of Twitter's engineering culture. A project like this brought together and saw contributions from multiple teams across Twitter Eng."

Though it may seem small, the feature was difficult to design so as to not clutter the users' timeline and make sense in the conventional flow and layout of the app. "We found it was challenging for people to quickly understand all the content in a Retweet with media. This was due to the layout; two large tweets stacked on top of each other."

To get around this, the original tweet is put in a box container with the retweeted media of the inner tweet condensed and spread across the full width to make for a more streamlined view.

Using this feature is simple and as expected. To add any media to a retweet, tap the "retweet with comment" option and then choose the image or GIF icon in the toolbar. Since this feature is not available for the web, it does make for a quirky experience on desktops. The company is on track to push another update to make media "more interactive and easier to read," which hopefully is a nod to make this feature work on the web version.

Another feature users can expect is the ability to hide replies to tweets. Once live, users will be able to filter out offensive or irrelevant content from conversation threads and hopefully would encourage everyone on the platform to be more respectful towards each other. According to the company, the feature will be tested soon with a planned roll out in June 2019.