Embedding photos in tweets with Twitter cards

Posted 17/02/2013

Some of you may have noticed that if you use the official Twitter clients, photos that I tweet from my pic.gs personal photo sharing site are being embedded into tweets – just like the photos from pic.twiter.com and other much larger sites (click to enlarge).

You can do this as well – but it is a little fiddly so I thought I would outline the steps I went through to get it working.

Twitter Cards is a Twitter function that allows extracts of a post, or a photo, video etc to be embedded into a tweet, if viewed from an official Twitter client (twitter.co/twitter for iPad/iPhone/Android etc).

First you need to work out if you want just the simple version (summary of your post), or the embedded photo or video.

There are 3 card types that can be attached to Tweets, each of which has a beautiful consumption experience built for Twitter’s web and mobile clients:

summary: The default card, which includes a title, description, thumbnail image, and Twitter account attribution.
photo: A Tweet sized photo card.
player: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player card.

More information can be found on the Twitter cards site.

To acomplish my posts displaying properly as Twitter Cards on Twitter, I am using an excellent wordpress plugin called JM Twitter cards.

Install this on your wordpress site and follow the settings – and it pretty much works out of the box.

You DO need to get your site approved by Twitter before it will work.

On the JM Twitter cards plugin there are links to the approval site.

You can test how your tweet will look via the Twitter cards test tool also, and I strongly recommend you do this first, or Twitter will reject your application until it works.

Once you have installed the plugin and tested that it is working, don’t forget to submit your site to Twitter for approval.

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