I know how to share photos from my iPhone onto Facebook and Instagram, but am a bit confused about how to tweet them out to my twitter followers. Is that possible directly from the iPhone 5c? And what if I’m following a hashtag too?
An iPhone 5c. Congratulations on your new phone. The firmware OS of the iPhone 5c, of course, is the same as every other modern iPhone, including the 4, 4s, 5 and even 5s: iOS 7. Now you might be running an earlier version of iOS if you haven’t updated, but here’s the good news: the easiest way to post Tweets from your iPhone with both a hashtag and a photo is best done from the Twitter app itself.
I also want to point out one more thing, though it’s possible you already realize that Twitter doesn’t actually support posting photographs or other images, but rather works with a third party image uploading service, posting the URL of the photo instead. Not a worry, but worth realizing before you dive in: some people will see the photo but most will see a link to it instead.
But let’s see how this all works. I recently attended the At-Home Dad Convention and we used the Twitter hashtag of #AHDConvention, as you can see in the below screen capture from the Twitter app on my own iPhone 5s:
You can see that all the matching tweets include the hashtag, as you’d hope.
Here’s a neat feature of the Twitter iPhone app, though: Tap on the box with the quill icon on the top right and the hashtag shows up automatically:
Handy!
I’ll tap out a short message tied to the photo I’m going to share…
And now the fun part. Just above the “I” and “O” on the keyboard is a small icon that kinda looks like a landscape stacked atop another one (yeah, I am possibly stretching things here in my desire to figure out what all these icons mean). In any case, there are three icons just above the keyboard, left to right: tag your location, take a photo with the camera or access your photo roll.
Tap on the third if you’ve already taken the photo — what I do 99% of the time — and you’ll be asked if you want to let Twitter access your photos (if it’s the first time you’ve done this. If not, you’ll skip this step):
Oh sure, why not?
Tap on “OK” and…
It’s that first photo on the second row I want to share, the tacos I had for lunch, so I’ll tap on that.
The photo takes over the screen:
Here’s a really cool thing you can do in the Twitter app at this point to fine tune your photograph: Tap on the three circles icon on the very bottom of the screen.
Your photograph is then shown with a series of photo filters applied:
Hmm… decisions decisions.
I think “1972” looks good, a sort of faded and distorted color shift. Don’t like any? Tap “Cancel” on the top left. Like one? Tap on it, then tap “Done”.
Now you’ll see your tweet ready to go, photo, hashtag and all:
Look good? (not the tacos! those were good, though)
If you’re ready to proceed, tap on “Tweet” and you’re done. The tweet will now be posted with the hashtag and link to the uploaded image, all of which has been taken care of behind the scenes by the iPhone Twitter app.
Now about that lunch…