When Twitter updated its now eight-year-old social network with a couple of tweet-extending features Thursday, it also laid the groundwork for an explosion of tweet creativity. Following in the footsteps of ASCII art, users now have the ability to post up to four photos in one post. Twitter calls this a "Photo Collage." We call it wicked fun.
But how do you make a collage, and then once you know how, what collages are best? Consider this your step-by-step guide to an eye-popping collage masterpiece (or at least something that makes your friends laugh).
First, you need to make sure you have the latest version of Twitter for iPhone: That would be 6.3. Sorry, there's no support on Android or Twitter.com for now.
Twitter Catch Collage. pic.twitter.com/jDIN3jDKDk
— Lance Ulanoff (@LanceUlanoff) April 1, 2014
Twitter collages will, when complete, appear as a four-square grid on the iPhone and Twitter.com, but as a series of vertical photos in TweetDeck. The grid design introduces a number of tantalizing possibilities. You can, for example, plan a set of photos that are linked together. Maybe the action starts in one photo and continues from one to the next, like the one above. Let's see how I created it.
If you want your four collage photos to work together, you'll need to do a little planning. For ours, we thought it might be fun to have Mashable intern Brian Koeber play catch with himself.
You'll notice that Twitter.com and Twitter for iPhone significantly crop the top and bottom of the photos, so you'll need to keep your subjects in the center of the frame. The edges are not cropped, so you can "connect" photos that way.
With your four photos on your phone, open Twitter and select the photo icon. You can also select the camera icon if you plan on taking your four photos from inside Twitter. Select the first photo (the one that will appear in the upper left corner). That photo thumbnail now appears in your tweet draft.
Select the photo icon again. All the photos now have a radio button selection option. The first photo you selected will be labeled "1." Now select the photo you want in your upper right corner. It will get a "2" label. You can continue and select your lower left photo, which gets a "3" label and, finally, your lower right photo, which naturally gets the "4" label.
To see your tweet draft again, you'll need to hold and drag down on the image gallery. Unfortunately, Twitter does not show you a preview of your collage. Instead, you only see the first two images in the draft tweet. If you post your tweet, you'll see an image link, but your followers will see your collage. If they tap on it, they see the first full photo and then can click or gesture from right to left to see the rest of the images.
With so little control over cropping, creating Twitter collages is an imprecise art, at best. However, that unpredictability adds a little surprise and, perhaps, serendipity to the process.