Twitter's Direct Photo Sharing Feature Goes Live

Twitter's photo sharing feature, first announced in June, is now live. The next time users log into Twitter they will be prompted, as above, and given a chance to "learn more."

The site has teamed with photo site Photobucket to host the images. Twitter confirmed that all EXIF data will be removed from the image when it's uploaded, reducing privacy concerns.

The site isn't going to offer galleries of photos initially, but their help page did state that user media galleries will be unveiled in the coming weeks. Those galleries will allow others to see the images a user has shared on Twitter.

Those galleries will also include images shared on Twitter via other photo sharing services such as TwitPic and yfrog. Those, and other Twitter photo sharing services, were taken aback by Twitter's June announcement, although they were probably not taken by surprise.

For now, those third-party photo sharing sites still have mobile all to themselves. Twitter hasn't said when it will update its apps to provide direct photo sharing, or when it would make an API available for third-party apps such as TweetCaster to add the feature themselves.