Twitter Starts Allowing Users To Retweet Tweets With Pictures, Videos Or GIFs

It's easy to express one's feeling by simply retweeting a Twitter tweet with a comment.

But there are times that users just can't find the right words. Twitter has given many things, but that many things didn't include the ability to retweet tweets with pictures, videos, or GIFs. And here, the microblogging platform finally made this happen.

To help users with this, Twitter added a functionality where users can add more than just text comments to retweets, the social media company said.

The company showed off the feature, by responding to one user’s tweet from back in January demanding the feature, with a GIF, and announced it on a tweet.

This way, Twitter feed is getting a lot more animated.

Rolling out to Twitter on iOS, Android, and mobile web app worldwide, users just need to hit that the retweet button on any of tweets, to then select Retweet with comment.

Here, users can choose a picture, video, or GIF, along with some text as a response. Hitting 'Send' will post the tweet.

At the moment of the announcement, Twitter shows the tweet users have responded to as a link with their tweet content.

What this means, others should tap on the link to see the original tweet.

People have been urging Twitter to add the feature for months.

According to Twitter, this addition is small to the service, but was difficult to design in a way that made sense and wasn’t overwhelming when viewed in the timeline.

The company said the updates to the retweet feature involved teamwork and collaboration across multiple teams, as the changes impacted things like the tweet detail page, timelines, accessibility features and parity across Twitter clients.

"We found it was challenging for people to quickly understand all the content in a Retweet with media. This was due to the layout; two large tweets stacked on top of each other," said a Twitter spokesperson.

To solve that, Twitter embeds the original tweet in a smaller indented box (with the user’s avatar still visible), with its own media width.

"The most exciting part of this project was that we were working on a feature that many people asked for," wrote the Twitter engineer. "We’re very excited to launch this feature across Twitter, and we can’t wait to see it being used by all of you."

Twitter notes that some brands and creators are already using this functionality on day one, including @GameOfThrones and @NASA.