As you may remember, Instagram had a little spat with Twitter that resulted in Instagram disabling all photo integration with Twitter. What that means for Twitter users is that they are no longer able to view Instagram photos when they click to “expand” tweets.
Instead, users have to click the link inside the tweet to be taken to Instagram.com to view the photos. At the time, Instagram said that it was “the correct thing for our business to do at this time,” and it may have been. But in the end, it’s the users of both services that ended up suffering.
Anyway, there’s a new Chrome extension you may be interested in if you want to bring back Instagram photos (or at least thumbnail previews) to Twitter.
It’s called Previeweet, and it’s a simple extension that adds thumbnail preview images to nearly every tweet containing photos.
Apart from photo previews from Instagram, you’ll also see them from a bunch of other image services like Dribbble, Twitter (pic.twitter.com), Photobucket, Facebook, Apple, Yfrog, Twitpic, Twitvid, Flickr, Imgur.
With all of the other services (that still have Twitter Card support), clicking on the image itself will open up the image, larger, in an expanded tweet – just like it would if you clicked “expand” instead. But for the Instagram photos, clicking on the thumbnail will take you to the photo’s home on Instagram.com, the same way it would if you clicked the Instagram link instead. So, it’s not perfect, but it does give you a small preview of the photo so you will get a better idea of whether or not you want to click out to Instagram’s site to view it full size.
All you have to do is install the Chrome extension and fire up Twitter. Previeweet warns that due to the twitter cache, you may need to clear the browser cache to get the preview to appear.
[via AllTwitter]