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    Hands On With Twitter's New Photo Filters

    By Christina Warren | Mashable – Tue, Dec 11, 2012

    Twitter Image, Filtered

    This is an image created with Twitter's new Filters.

    Click here to view this gallery.

    [More from Mashable: This Is What You Talked About on Twitter in 2012]

    Twitter announced it was adding photo filters to its iOS and Android apps Monday.

    Twitter added its own image hosting service back in 2011 and over the last 18 months has become progressively more interested in images. Reports of Twitter photo filters first surfaced in November with the understanding that Twitter wanted to compete against Instagram. To do so, Twitter decided to team-up with Aviary to offer its own filters and cropping options.

    [More from Mashable: Pinterest Adds Support for Twitter Cards]

    The new feature was announced after Instagram pulled Twitter Cards support for its images and updated its apps with new features and filters.

    The result is something that feels like a cross between Instagram and the Facebook Camera app.

    Adding Filters

    The process of taking or editing a photo and adding a filter is very simple. In our experience, cropping and moving photos in Twitter is much easier than with Instagram.

    The familiar 4x4 aspect ratio is available which will make Instagram veterans feel at home.

    Right now, Twitter offers only eight filters. These filters, powered by Aviary, are basic but attractive.

    After settling on a filter, the image is compressed, saved to the camera roll and added to a tweet. The image appears inline in Twitter's official apps and apps that support Twitter Cards.

    We'll have a more in-depth filter showdown in the next few days but for now, we find the Twitter filters a nice addition.

    Still, I wonder if this is enough to steer photogs away from Instagram and directly into Twitter for sharing moments and memories. After all, even if Instagram did drop Twitter Cards support, the application can still publish links to the service. On Twitter, photos are constrained to Twitter.

    If the company is serious about photos, it's going to need to introduce a "Photo Only" stream. Otherwise, finding images that users are taking is still much too difficult.

    What do you think of Twitter's new photo filters? Let us know in the comments.

    This story originally published on Mashable here.

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