Twitter now lets you attach four images to a Tweet and tag friends

In case anyone doubted Twitter’s commitment to photo-sharing the company added a couple of features Wednesday that made its direction clear. You can now add four photos to a single tweet and for the first time, you can tag up to 10 friends in a Twitter photo, without taking away from your 140-character count. The photos you add will appear as a four-part collage in your timeline. If anyone clicks on one of them, they’ll get the full picture. In Tweetdeck, however, the pictures appear to simply follow one after the other.

Twitter will now let you attach up to four images to a Tweet, and tag the people in those photos, all without counting towards your 140-character limit. This is a pretty obvious attempt to beat Instagram and make Twitter your go-to sharing service. The new features work if you’re using Twitter’s own mobile app. The image picker now lets you add up to four images, and you can add ten tags per Tweet and still have all your characters for the Tweet itself. Anyone you tag will get notified, and when you view a photo full-screen you can swipe through in a kind of mini slideshow. You can also use the setting to decide who can tag you (and you can do this in the settings on the Twitter site so there’s no need to get the app to do it).