Expert's Rating
Pros
Cons
Our Verdict
Now that I’m a parent, I like sharing my photos more than ever. I regularly take advantage of iPhoto ‘09’s integration with Flickr and Facebook, but sharing photos on Twitter is a bit more complicated, since you need to get a photo out of iPhoto and onto your desktop in order to upload it somewhere.
That’s where Blue Crowbar Software’s iPhoto2Twitter 1.5 comes in handy. This €5 plug-in for iPhoto ‘08 and ‘09 lets you select a photo in iPhoto, publish it to Twitpic or Mobypicture, and then tweet the link. (Which service should you use? Twitpic is for photos only, while Mobypicture lets you upload photos or video to multiple places simultaneously—Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube, as well as to WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal blogs.)
After installing the plug-in, you can upload it for Twitter via a new iPhoto2Twitter option in iPhoto’s Export dialog: just select a photo and choose File -> Export. The first time you use this option, you’ll need to click on Setup and enter your Twitter account info; you’ll also need to choose whether you want to use Twitpic or Mobypicture (you can switch between them at any time).
You choose the export size, in pixels, for each photo—500 by 500, 600 by 600, 1200 by 1200, 2000 by 2000, or the original size. The fixed sizes make it seem as though you’ll be uploading a square picture, but the numbers actually refer to the longest size of your image; for example, using the 500 by 500 option for a horizontal image from my camera results in photo that’s 500 pixels wide by 332 pixels high. (The plug-in currently limits photo size to 4MB; if your image is larger than that, you must choose one of the reduced export sizes.)
There’s also a box for typing your 140-or-fewer-character message (tweet); a live character count shows how many characters you have left. The software is smart enough to alert you when you’ve typed more than will be allowed once the photo URL is included, although the overage display uses gray text that’s difficult to distinguish from the normal black text.
Click on Export and the plug-in takes care of the rest. In my tests, uploading to Twitpic worked flawlessly. When I used Mobypictures to upload to Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr at the same time, I ended up with double posts to my Facebook page—one with the photo displayed, one without it—but that was due to Mobypicture’s Post Status Messages option. Once I turned off that option, Mobypicture uploads functioned as desired, although pictures tagged using iPhoto’s Names feature didn’t come across with the tagging intact when posted on Facebook (iPhoto ‘09’s Facebook export retains that information).
My only issue with iPhoto2Twitter is that you can’t select other image services, such as yFrog and img.ly, with shorter URLs (and thus more room for your personal text). The developer says he has no plans to add other services unless he becomes unhappy with the current ones, or if a new service becomes available with interesting new features. Still, if you use iPhoto and enjoy posting pictures to your Twitter account, iPhoto2Twitter is well worth the registration fee.
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