Using it is very simple. After downloading and launching the EXE file from the link at the bottom of this post, you enter the Twitter username of the person whose photos you wish to download in the “Screen name” text-box, and click on “Download”. How to Download Pictures from Twitter. It is possible to download photos and other images from Twitter either on your phone or your computer. This article describes how to do that, as well as how to download images from tweets with more.
Josh Catone is a writer, editor, and entrepreneur from Providence, Rhode Island. He is a social media enthusiast and the founder of the web's largest Ruby on Rails community, Rails Forum. You can follow him on
As the web moves toward its real-time future, Twitter is clearly becoming one of the most important ways for people to share content. From celebrity gossip to customer complaints, from blog post links to breaking news, Twitter is an amazing platform for sharing short bursts of information, both meaningful and mundane. But how many words can you fit into a 140 character tweet? If you could include images, the answer would be at least a thousand, right?
Unfortunately, Twitter doesn't have any built-in way to attach images to its 140 character posts, so we're left turning to third-party solutions to add a little visual flair to our tweets. There are a number of good ways to share images on Twitter, though, and here are five of them.
1. Via a Twitter Image Sharing Service
Because Twitter doesn't directly support image attachments, a large number of third-party services have sprung up to fill that need. There are a lot of these, and new ones seem to appear almost daily. Here are six of the best.
Twitpic: Twitpic is the largest and most popular image sharing service on Twitter, in part due to all the attention it got in January when the first pictures of the Hudson River plane crash were shared on the site. It also has some popular celebrity users, like Grant Imahara from Mythbusters.
TweetPhoto: Competing with Twitpic will definitely be a steep, uphill battle for any other Twitter photo sharing service, but TweetPhoto offers a numbers of compelling features, such as stats, geo-tagging, favoriting, and Facebook integration, that make it a worthy competitor.
Pikchur: A multi-platform app, Pikchur lets users share images automatically in multiple places, including Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Tumblr, and Flickr. Sign up is optional, meaning you can get started very quickly.
Twitgoo: Borrowing the look and feel of Twitter, Twitgoo asks its users, 'What are you lookin' at?' It is integrated into a number of third party apps, including favorites like Tweetie for Mac and TwitterBerry.
yfrog: Since yfrog comes from the guys behind ImageShack, you can bet it is going to be extremely simple, with a singular purpose in mind. Upload, log in, share — that's it, but that's all you need, right?
Picktor: Like Pikchur, Picktor helps users more easily share photos across multiple social sites. The new dead-simple Twitter image sharing service they launched last month uses Twitter's oAuth implementation, so you rest easy knowing your login credentials are safe.
2. Via SMS or Email
Sharing images via a third party service is great, but what about users who want to send updates to Twitter via SMS message or email? Fortunately, three third-party services have your back.
Mobypicture: Mobypicture's Twitter image sharing service is one of the easiest and perhaps most ingenious methods of pushing pictures to Twitter in this round up. All you need to do is send an email or MMS message containing a photo, a title (subject) and optional body text to twituser.twitpass@mobypicture.com, where 'twituser' and 'twitpass' are your Twitter login credentials. Mobypicture then sends out your tweet for you, no sign up required. You'll have to judge for yourself how secure it is to email your Twitter username and password to a third-party service, though.
Twitxr: Twitxr has end-to-end mobile photo sharing covered, with native applications for the iPhone, Windows Mobile and PocketPC, Nokia and Motorola phones, a mobile site and support for email posting. The site supports posting to Facebook, Picasa, and Flickr, in addition to posting photos to Twitter.
Posterous: The email-based blogging service Posterous recently noted on its own blog that its API can be used to upload photos to Posterous using just Twitter credentials. Essentially, users can email photos to Posterous, which are then automatically posted to Twitter (and Facebook) in addition to being added to their Posterous blog site.
3. Via Brightkite or FriendFeed
Both Brightkite and Friendfeed are useful micro messaging platforms in their own right, but neither have garnered near the level of attention that Twitter has. Both services integrate closely with Twitter, and because the services support photo sharing, users of each site can send images back to their Twitter streams.
Brightkite: To share images on Brightkite, navigate to the 'Sharing' tab of the 'Account Settings' page. Enter your Twitter username and password and make sure 'When I post a photo.' is checked. Now any time you post a photo via Brightkite, it will be copied back to Twitter using a shortened URL (bkite.com). This is especially handy for iPhone users, since Brightkite's native iPhone app has support for taking and sharing photos within the application.
Friendfeed: A very large portion of Friendfeed's content is pulled in via Twitter, which is unsurprising given just how popular Twitter is and the nature of its service (which encourages the creation of a lot of small bits of content). But text, links, and images shared on Friendfeed directly can also be copied back to Twitter. Just make sure you check the 'Cc: Twitter,' box. If you add a photo, it will be shared via a shortened URL (ff.im).
4. Via Skitch
Skitch is different from the other sites mentioned in this post in that it isn't specifically made for Twitter. Rather, Skitch is a Mac-native image editing client that uniquely has sharing directly built in. Once you're done editing a photo, you can click the 'Webpost' button to automatically upload it to the Internet, and then you can share the image via the provided link.
5. Via an Encoded Tweet
This one is a bit theoretical, but pretty cool. Recently, Flickr user Quasimondo posted the results of a competition to write an image encoder/decoder that could pack up an image inside a single tweet. Not a link to a picture, as is the case in every other service mentioned in this post, but the actual data that makes up the image.
Quasimondo used Chinese characters for his encoder since UTF-8 encoding let him send 210 bytes of data in the 140 characters allowed per tweet. He goes into a good deal of detail about the technical aspects of how he's doing the encoding and compressing the data in his Flickr stream, but the actual visual results of his experiment are rather impressive.
It would make a lot of sense for Twitter to build image sharing functionality into the Twitter web and mobile interfaces natively. It’s unlikely they’ll actually host any images (Twitter has always outsourced URL shortening, after all, first to TinyURL and more recently to Bit.ly), but we wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter someday added thumbnail preview functionality for shared image links.
In the meantime, though, there are a ton of options for sharing images on Twitter, including many not mentioned here. Which is your preferred method?
More Twitter resources from Mashable:
- 5 Terrific Twitter Research Tools
- HOW TO: Use Twitter for Customer Service
- HOW TO: Find a Job on Twitter
- 5 Impressive Mashups of Twitter and Flickr
- 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates
How To Download Gif Images From Twitter
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, wibs24[blippr note='Pikchur' /]
If your Instagram feed is as chock-full of amazing photography as mine is, then you've probably found yourself wondering how to download Instagram photos at some point. That's what we'll show you today: how to save Instagram photos from your stream and how to back up your own Instagram photos.
How to save photos on Instagram
The Instagram app doesn't automatically allow you to save photos (or even to zoom in, for that matter). We've already shown you how to zoom in on Instagram photos with just the Android system, but saving Instagram photos will require an app.
1. Download and install InstaSave via the button below.
InstaSave2. Open the app and sign in with your Instagram login details. Your stream will be reproduced as selectable icons, just like in your Gallery app.
3. Find the image you want to save (you can search for users with the Search magnifying glass icon).
4. Tap the Save button at the top right of the screen – which looks like a floppy disk.
5. You'll see the save location of the folder, which you can then explore through your Gallery app.
How to save your own photos on Instagram
If, at one point, you turned off Instagram's auto-save feature in a flurry of storage-saving madness, you might want to turn that option back on. If you've never poked around in the Instagram settings then you're probably safe and the app is auto-saving your uploaded photos to your device. But if you're not sure, it doesn't hurt to double check.
1. Open Instagram and go to your profile page at the far right.
2. Tap the overflow menu in the top right hand corner (the three dots).
3. Go down until you see the option for 'Save original photos' and make sure the switch is flipped to the 'On' position.
4. You can do the same for your videos too if you like. They'll be saved in a folder in your Gallery app.
How to download your Instagram photos on PC
Say you've lost your phone and signed into Instagram on a new device. Maybe you'd like to download a copy of all of your Instagram photos to keep on your new phone? Or create an archive on your computer? That's easy to do as well, but you'll need to do it on a computer rather than via your phone.
1. Go to the Instaport site on your computer.
2. Login with your Instagram credentials.
3. Choose whether you want to download all photos or just selected ones.
4. Save the images to your computer.
5. If you want them on your phone now, connect your phone to your computer with a USB cable and copy the files to your phone.
6. Save them in the Instagram folder in your Gallery/Photos (or wherever you would like to keep them).
Help Me Download My Pictures
Do you save your Instagram photos? Did you know you could download other peoples' photos?