How to export your Twitpic pics

by @JoBrodie, brodiesnotes.blogspot.com

Updated 25 October 10pm - Twitpic pictures already there are safe, no new pics can be added
Twitter has taken control of Twitpic.com and all the pictures will remain there. You won't be able to add new pictures (see Section 4 for alternative) but you'll still be able to download your archive or delete old Twitpic pics. More at the Twitpic blog: http://blog.twitpic.com/2014/10/twitpics-future/

ACT QUICKLY - Twitpic is closing tomorrow and it takes a while for the service to return your download link (lots of other people are trying to do this too), go here and download your pics http://twitpic.com/account/settings (or if it won't let you, go here http://twitpic.com/ first and log in).

At time of writing (16:30 BST Saturday afternoon, UK time) pictures are now visible again on the site, I can see all 347 of my images http://twitpic.com/photos/JoBrodie - I don't know if this means there's been a reprieve or if it's just a temporary assistance for people who've struggled to download their pictures (see 800 million Twitpic photos to vanish from the web Saturday).


TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Twitpic is shutting down (yes it is, on 25 October 2014 - it isn't accepting new pics, old ones OK)
2. How to download your Twitpic archive - you can still do this (but no longer urgent)
3. Tell others how to download their archive (no longer necessary)
4. Alternatives to Twitpic for future picture posting
5. It's now after 25 October and I didn't know about this
6. Background reading

1. Twitpic is shutting down (yes it is, on 25 October 2014 - it isn't accepting new pics, old ones OK)

First Twitpic was shutting down, then it wasn't, now it is. We've got until 25 October 2014 to request copies of any photos posted there (remember you may not have posted pics there manually, but by having Twitpic set as the default photo handling app within whichever Twitter app you're using on your smartphone / tablet).

 

http://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/ 

Your Twitpic page is easy to find (to be honest I think everyone has one by virtue of being on Twitter, something that initially puzzled everyone but we soon came round), it's
http://twitpic.com/photos/yourtwittername so mine is http://twitpic.com/photos/JoBrodie

2. How to download your Twitpic archive - you can still do this (but no longer urgent)

You can download your pics by clicking this link: Get your Twitpic pics, then logging in by authorising via Twitter, then scrolling down the resulting page (past Mobile, Privacy, Linked Accounts and Delete Account) to Export your photos, then click on the green button saying request your data - it looks like this.

Once clicked it will start processing and you'll see this - I don't know yet how long this will take (presume it depends on the number of your photos).

Quite a few hours later (I checked over a day later after seeing others' reports on Twitter) your account page (http://twitpic.com/account/settings) will look like this...

...if you click or right-save on the Download Now link on your page your file will look a bit like this (mine is deliberately mangled). It's a zip file.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/photos/exports/26[000]0-[numbersANDlettersLOTSofThem]d0934b620c70d31[MoreAlphanumerics].zip

3. Tell others how to download their archive (no longer necessary)

If you want to be helpful / annoying, search for Twitpic on Twitter and filter it by people you know (you can only do this on Twitter dot com) and then tell them to do this.

4. Alternatives to Twitpic for future pic posting [workarounds]

An obvious place to start is to search on Google for Twitpic alternatives but here are some suggestions for computers and smartphones.

Twitter.com
If you're on the website it's very easy, when posting a new tweet, to click on the small camera symbol to add a photo from those already on your computer. Look, there's even 'Add photo' text, easy peasy :)

Flickr
It's free to use - I don't know if you can autopost to Twitter from Flickr but if not you can certainly grab the photo's link / URL and share it manually. Or you could use this IFTTT recipe to automatically post from Flickr > Twitter. Fairly certain you can also email a picture to Flickr so presumably once it's loaded it can autopost to Twitter if you set it up.

Tweetdeck
Like Twitter.com it has an 'add photo' button on the new tweet popup window so this would also work.

Google search results for Flickr auto post to Twitter

yfrog / Imageshack
I'm afraid I've no experience of these but found older info about them in a search for Twitpic alternatives. Apparently yfrog maintains view counts, however when I clicked on the relevant link (twitter.yfrog.com) it had turned into imageshack. There is a yfrog website but there's no Twitter login that I could see.

IFTTT - "if this then that"
See above (Flickr section) for suggested recipe with Flickr but I'm sure there are others available for other services.

iPhone apps (it's the phone I have, sorry if you use Android etc, dunno about those!)
On Echofon for iPhone on the version I have you can currently choose (in Settings) between Twitpic or Twitter, so pick Twitter. I suspect Twitter provides its own iOS app users with the same Twitter pic uploading service. Twitter-loaded pictures will automatically show as an autopreview in the tweet (you don't have to click to see the picture, it shows up already) whereas Twitpic never did this (often a blessing in fact!)

The embedded CameraRoll thing on your iPhone will also let you link up with your Twitter account, as will Flickr. In fact most apps that can handle sharing and / or pictures will let you share a pic to Twitter (the Vimeo app's good for videos to Twitter).

Instagram (not restricted to iPhones as far as I know)
You can autopost from this service, however I don't think it will autopreview though. I can live with that.

Other alternatives that I've seen suggested on Twitter but don't know much about include
• Mlkshk http://mlkshk.com/
• Mobypicture http://www.mobypicture.com/
• TwitrPix http://twitrpix.com/ (you can send photos via email http://twitrpix.com/faq#faq-3)
• imgur http://imgur.com/
• img.ly http://img.ly/

Non-free services
It looks like Mymeedia are canny entrepreneurs, introducing themselves on Twitter to people who've tweeted about Twitpic. From a cursory glance it seems that their service is a bit more bells and whistles than a basic pic uploader, but you may like to take a look. It seems to be more about displaying photos than attaching a single photo to a tweet but I'm sure you can do that too. They also let you email pictures in to the service.

5. It's now after 25 October and I didn't know about this, can I get my old pics?

All old pictures seem to be saved and will remain on Twitpic.com which is now owned by Twitter. Panic not.

Not sure, seems unlikely. I'd say 'doubtful' at this stage.

As far as I can tell Twitpic pictures are no longer visible on their original link. Here's a tweet I sent in 2013 and not only does the image not show in the embedded tweet below but it doesn't on its own page (http://t.co/5lvUDL08rr which resolves to http://twitpic.com/240uhz) either.

@mjrobbins god how amazing! Though I suspect my electricity meter is too old, this is it http://t.co/5lvUDL08rr ?
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) October 17, 2013

There don't appear to be any cached versions either (if you type the link into Google search, press enter, you can sometimes see a small green arrowhead pointing down, click on it for the cache, if absent, no cache).

There are other ways to view cached pages, including Archive.org but to be honest I'd be very surprised if anyone's photos were included here. I don't think it'll help but here's an old post I wrote on 'Finding things that aren't there any more on the internet'.

I suppose you could ask Noah Everett who created the Twitpic service: @noaheverett

Good luck :)

6. Background reading

Twitpic is shutting down post updated in October (4 September 2014) Twitpic blog (same as linked above).

800 million Twitpic photos to vanish from the web Saturday (24 October 2014) Global News

Workaround for manually retweeting (eg comment retweeting) a tweet with a Twitter picture in it

by @JoBrodie brodiestnotes.blogspot.com

This refers to using Twitter on twitter.com the website (ie on a browser) and may or may not be relevant to those using third party apps on tablets or phones.

Update 8 March 2015
Oh for asterisks' sake, Twitter's tweaked it again. Using the technique below didn't work for me today (I ended up sending this tweet which has no credit to the person who originally wrote it) so I did the following and it worked instead.

• Click on the tweet's timestamp to go to the its own page (example)
• Ctrl+U to bring up the page's sourcecode
• Ctrl+F to bring up search dialogue box, then type pic.twitter into the box to search for the picture's actual address (http://pic.twitter.com/0ILNnWfiYc - it will look like a pic in a tweet)
• Pasted that into a new tweet
• From the tweet page, copied the text and name of the tweet sender and put it into the new tweet before the pic.twitter address
• Sent (example)
• Blogged, grumpily ;)

(Note you can click outside the tweet and it will disappear, but clicking on the 'new tweet' feather / quill icon will bring u a new tweet window with your unsent text in it, so it's fine to toggle among different windows / tabs to collect all the bits you need to send the tweet).

It worked. The below is kept for my prospective historical irritation.

EDIT 5 October 2014
Five weeks on from writing this post Twitter seems to have changed things again. I've seen several tweets referring to a cartoon by UK cartoonist Matt about human rights - the cartoon doesn't automatically appear at all unless I click on the tweet.

 

I'm leaving the one below as a small version as I'm not sure about the ethics of sharing a full-size version of his cartoon.

The original tweet's address is https://twitter.com/paullewismoney/status/518656173982351360 and when you go there and hover over the picture its (right click / copy) address shows up as https://twitter.com/paullewismoney/status/518656173982351360/photo/1 but on collecting it it seems to be this https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzKjCoRCQAAhhQq.png

I'm afraid I've really no idea how you'd neatly copy and paste the text of the tweet and the address of the picture, such that the picture would show up in your own tweet, so that you could add a comment and manually retweet it. Can't see a good reason for Twitter to make this difficult, though I can see plenty of reasons.

Remember you can share a link to a tweet (the person may be alerted with a notification when you do) but I've no idea what happens if you share a link to the 'pbs.twimg' link.

Copying and pasting the tweet looks like this. Haha what a mess. Adding a comment to a tweet can be a valuable part of the Twitter ecosystem and I've written previously in praise of manual (comment) retweets.

Here's what it was like five weeks ago when it was still doable, though fiddly.

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1. Manually retweeting a tweet containing a pic.twitter link
When Twitter publishes a tweet that contains a pic.twitter-hosted image (not all images are affected, it depends if where it's hosted) it hides the picture's address (URL) and just presents the image within the tweet.

This means that if you want to retweet it and add a comment the method of copying and pasting the text doesn't work, because the text lacks the picture's URL. I just found this out.

This is what the tweet originally looked like...

 

  ...and here's what I ended up sending out...

...note lack of picture!

What you need to do is go to the original tweet and click on the picture, which will then look like the version below - you can see there's a tweet below it with the full pic.twitter.blah web address, you need to include that in your comment-retweet.  (This isn't necessary for tweets with instagram or similar links because Twitter doesn't automatically display the picture while hiding the URL).

Perhaps Twitter is gradually making it more of an uphill struggle for people to do anything other than press the RT button but I often prefer manual RTs for a variety of very good reasons. 

I don't especially like the ones where someone's just copied and pasted the text then stuck nothing but an "RT" in front of it and have seen other people comment that it's "stealing' the tweet (if that one gets RTed instead of the original you get all the glory). This can be true, however that's probably not the only reason people are doing it. While not forensic it traps a copy of the tweet in case later deleted, it also captures it into your own timeline making it easier to find again in future in your own archive.

But I'd still rather see the tactic done with at least a comment added.

More by me on this topic 

In praise of manual RTs (26 May 2014) 

2. Clicking on some pic.twitter pictures just makes them smaller - a solution

Usually when you click on an online picture it gets bigger, not pic.twitter pictures in tweets though. This has been background-irritatingly me for a while, until I heard of a solution which I've embedded below. Thanks Unity!

@JoBrodie Right click on image then select "view image" then click once on image to zoom to full size. @zeno001
— Unity (@Unity_MoT) September 3, 2014

Twitter's new photo preview just takes up more space - here's one partial solution

Highlights
Three possible solutions:
1. Don't contribute to the problem: when using an app to upload a picture to Twitter see if Twitpic is available as an alternative in-app uploader (eg on Echofon the default is Twitter but it can be changed to Twitpic. 'Twitter'-pictures will autopreview, but Twitpics pictures don't. Thank you! Mwah xx

2. @ajfisher has written a script that can be copied and pasted into the 'Stylish' (free) Chrome plugin. I've tried it, it works - hooray, and also gets rid of promoted tweets. If anyone hears of anything for Firefox do let me know.
• Twitter Web Client Inline Image Removal

3. Thanks to @latentexistence I heard of a way to use AdBlock to hide the images - you can still click on the tweet to expand as before but it seems to work (I've not tried it myself as I don't use AdBlock).
• How to hide Twitter preview images with AdBlock

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More detailed information

OK, I've solved the internet ;) Don't use pic .twitter .com to upload pics to Twitter (use Twitpic instead) & timelines will be less piccy.
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) October 30, 2013

What's this all about?
For anyone reading their tweets through Twitter.com's website it's now a bit hard going. Here's what Twitter looks like on my desktop now. The two tweets shown have a picture with them which Twitter's now displaying automatically in preview mode. Can't escape this and as you can see it takes up rather a lot of space.



As of Tuesday 29 October 2013 Twitter's implemented a new thing in which it automatically shows a preview pane of any image or video ('media') that's been included in a tweet. You can still click on the tweet to expand both the tweet and the media viewer as before but it seems that if you're using http://twitter.com (and to be fair, loads of people don't!) then you can't escape the previews. You can switch them off in most apps though, but not on the website version of Twitter.

What can be done?
• To stop contributing to the problem don't use pic.twitter.com to upload pictures from smartphones / tablets.

This seems to be the default setting on Echofon for iPhone but was easily fixed by going to Menu » Settings » (scroll down to Advanced) » Photo Upload » (select Twitpic). I'm sure something similar exists for other apps and smartphones / tablets.

If you upload photos to Twitter directly from your photostream (eg you've previously authorised your Photos app to use your Twitter account) then images will show up on Twitter as being sent via 'Camera on iOS' and will show up as pic.twitter.com with autopreviews.

Oddly, if you're using Twitter.com on a desktop and want to upload a picture using the button that should be visible in the tweet below it does use pic.twitter.com but doesn't autopreview it. I can't explain that at the moment.

Test to see what happens when I upload a photo on Twitter dot com using the photo button pic.twitter.com/gNymRfc4sc
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) October 30, 2013

• To stop experiencing the problem don't use twitter.com on PC or Mac to view tweets.
This seems like admitting defeat though! But if you want to there are plenty of desktop apps such as Dabr and Janetter, all with free versions available.

What about other picture uploading apps?
I've only looked at a few of them, but here's what I've found
a) pic.twitter.com - via smartphone apps it activates Twitter's automatic preview thing, via web-based version it doesn't appear to do so.
b) Twitpic - doesn't activate preview
c)  imgur - doesn't activate preview
d) Instagram - doesn't activate preview

The big advantage of b) Twitpic is that if you click on the tweet it will expand and show the preview, but no preview while it's unclicked. Imgur and Instagram are 'off site' photo hosting apps and you have to click on the URL to view the pic, clicking on the tweet to expand doesn't do that. None of b), c) and d) will show a preview. Until Twitter changes them too ;)

Further reading
Lots of people ranting on the Twitter forum for Twitter developers (dev.twitter.com) - Why are pictures suddenly shown in the timeline without a "show picture" link? PLEASE ROLL THAT BACK, THANKS! 

BuzzFeed on Why Twitter Just Turned Itself Inside Out: Clicking is dead, scrolling is king. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the fight for the ultimate feed

ZDNet on How to hide Twitter preview images with AdBlock

Testing the Twitpic widget...

Instructions below, in the comments. The widget can be seen at the bottom of every page on this blog. (I did have the widget here, but then in writing this bit I deleted it, oops).