Learn how to post high-quality images to X and download photos from there in the best resolution on your phone or computer.
Our colleague Jim and we at iDB often post iPhone, iPad, and Mac wallpapers on X. To ensure those images are of the absolute best quality, it’s important to enable a setting that uploads them at full resolution.
Similarly, when you download images or our wallpapers from X, you should know how to load them in 4K quality and save that instead of the compressed version.
Upload high-quality images to your X posts
- Open the X app or website on your iPhone, iPad, or Android phone.
- Tap your profile picture from the top left corner of the Home tab.
- Tap Settings and Support and pick Settings and privacy.
- Select Accessibility, display, and languages.
- From here, tap Data usage.
- Make sure Data saver is off.
- Finally, tap High-quality image uploads and pick ‘On cellular or Wi-Fi.’
From now on, when you tweet an image, it will be uploaded in the best possible quality (up to 4K.)
In my observation, I noticed that Twitter supports up to 4096 × 4096 pixels (you see this number when you open a Twitter image in a new tab on a computer). Note that typically, 4K is 3840 × 2160 pixels, and for movie projection, 4K equates to 4096 × 2160 pixels.
Download images in 4K from X
- Tap the photo of a tweet so that it takes the full screen.
- Touch and hold the image or tap the three dots icon in the top right.
- Tap Load in 4K from the iOS Share Sheet.
- Twitter will reload the image in the best possible quality. Touch and hold the image or tap the three dots icon again.
- Now, tap Save Photo to download this 4K image to your phone’s Photos app.
If you’re on a computer
Open the image and then right-click over it followed by Open Image in New Tab. This will load the photo in its full quality in a new tab. Save it to your computer now.
See the difference
I downloaded a wallpaper posted by iDB using the Twitter app on my iPhone. It’s 946 × 2048 pixels in dimension and has a file size of 257 KB.
Next, I loaded the same image in 4K and saved it. It’s 1125 × 2436 pixels in dimension and a whooping 2.6 MB in size. In other words, it’s almost ten times the size of the regular version!
Note that not all images uploaded to X are available to download in 4K. But if the person who tweeted has enabled high-quality uploads (steps above) and has used a high-resolution image, then it can be downloaded in 4K.
On a related note: