Posts

Another problem with Twitter: it’s absolute turbotrash with format fuckery. While it’s disgusting with what it does with PNGs, the true horror comes with animations, as it converts anything into an .mp4 (and, as twitter does, lies to your face about what format it is).
 
In absolutely all cases, if you see an animation on an artist’s twitter you should check if they have it available on any other site they use; it’s practically guaranteed to be better. If nothing’s available, then you’re going to want to convert that proprietary aberration of a format into a gif or a webm.
 
Generally, you’re gonna want to convert to webm, as it’s a pretty straight forward conversion, accepts high frame rates and large palettes, and obviously audio. For that, go here: https://video.online-convert.com/convert/mp4-to-webm
 
If you’re sure the original animation was a gif or just want a gif that can play anywhere, then use the following to reconvert it back to a gif: https://ezgif.com/video-to-gif
 
In both cases, you can paste in the twitter post link into the URL field and that’s it. For gifs you may want to try some further optimization.
 
 
Anyway, stop using Twitter, it’s terrible for all sorts of reasons, many far more important than it’s objectively awful UX or the crimes it commits upon images.

By now you’re probably aware that Twitter is absolutely horrendous for intentionally browsing for art or trying to find things, and an unimaginable pain in the ass if you want to comfortably upload things from more than a few posts ago.
 
Thankfully there are solutions; the one I have is as follows:
 
Get the Twitter Media Download extension/add-on for Chromium or Firefox
 
Head to the twitter page for whatever artist you like and click on the new Media button at the top
 

 

 
Fiddle with the options for post ranges and media types, and tick Dry Run (unless you want a local copy of all the media)
 

 
 
Then you wait a while and download a zip file with a CSV in it. Import that CSV into your sheet editor of choice (I recommend Gdocs). Now you have an easily manageable list of post URLs and image URLs you can search and scroll through without being subjected to Twitter’s abhorrent UX.
 
Of course, you probably want some previews of the images. To do that: