5 Ways to Share Images on Twitter

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?