Hours after Instagram pulled its photos from Twitter's feed, Twitter announced it had a Plan B to keep sepia-hued images on its site: its own photo filters.
In a blog post published late Monday afternoon Twitter announced it would be adding its own suite of filters and photo-editing tools to its mobile apps.
The eight filters range from "gritty" to "cool," and users uploading photos from iOS devices and Android phones will be able to not only add a hue to their snapshots, but also crop, zoom into and "auto-enhance" their images.
Twitter's announcement means filters have officially gone from special to standard.
Since photo-focused apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic first popularized the faux-vintage look for photos, filters have become the norm, and the feature has been added to Facebook's photo-sharing app, and now to Twitter. In other words, we're pretty much at the point where you're more likely to see a photo that's been filtered than one that's au natural.
Instagram, for its part, decided to cease displaying users' photos on Twitter in a move designed to encourage people to visit Instagram's own site.
"Really it's about where do you go to consume that image, to interact with that image. We want that to be on Instagram," Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom recently told audiences at the LeWeb conference, according to CBSNews. "What we realized over time is we really needed to have an awesome web presence." A surprising stance from a company that rose to prominence thanks to its mobile-first mindset.
Find out more about Twitter's filters in this video, from Twitter.com, below:
And here's a sneak peek at how filters will function on the Twitter app:
twitter photo filters