Design4 min read
How to Download Images From X (Twitter) at Full Size
X keeps one file per photo and serves it at six named sizes. The timeline shows you a middling one; the largest is a single word away in the URL.
To download Twitter images at full size, take the photo's
pbs.twimg.com address and change name=medium to name=orig. X keeps one file per photo and serves it at six named sizes; the timeline asks for a middling one, and orig is the file exactly as it was uploaded.FreeMentioned in this article
X Image DownloaderEvery size of a photo on X, including the original the app never shows.The six sizes X serves
Every photo posted to X lives at one address on
pbs.twimg.com, and the name parameter picks which rendition comes back.name | Fits inside | Where X uses it |
|---|---|---|
thumb | 150 × 150 | The square crop in a multi-photo post |
small | 680 px wide | Timelines and narrow layouts |
medium | 1200 px wide | The desktop timeline — usually what a link card names |
large | 2048 px wide | The photo viewer, when you click through |
4096x4096 | 4096 px wide | Nothing in the interface |
orig | As uploaded | Nothing in the interface |
The last two are the interesting ones. Neither is reachable by clicking anything: they exist because the CDN will serve them, not because the app asks for them.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXAMPLE123?format=jpg&name=medium
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXAMPLE123?format=jpg&name=origorig is the upload, so it is only larger than large when the upload was larger than 2048 pixels. A photo posted from a phone camera usually was, by some margin. A screenshot posted from the same phone usually was not, and in that case the two files are identical — which is the correct outcome rather than a failure.Download Twitter images by hand
- Open the post and click the photo so it fills the viewer.
- Right-click it and choose Copy image address.
- Paste it somewhere you can edit. It will contain
name=followed by a size. - Change that size to
orig. - Open the edited address and save the file.
An older URL form is still in circulation and still served, ending in
.jpg:large rather than carrying a query string. The same idea applies: the suffix after the colon is the rendition name.Right-clicking in the timeline gets you the small one
The picture rendered in a timeline is
small or medium depending on the width of the column it landed in. Saving it saves that, at a resolution chosen for a layout you are not using and compressed a second time to get there.This matters most in the two places people usually take a screenshot: a slide, and a document. Both are printed or projected larger than a timeline column, and both make a second round of JPEG compression obvious in exactly the places a photo cannot afford it — skin, sky, and any text inside the image.
When X will not answer at all
X increasingly serves an interstitial rather than the post to anything that is not signed in. That affects every tool that reads a post link, ours included, and it is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up as a bug.
The way around it does not involve signing anything in. The size ladder is a property of the image address, not of the post — so if you can see the photo in your own browser, you can copy its address and derive every size from that with no request to X at all. The X image downloader accepts a
pbs.twimg.com link for that reason, and that route cannot be walled.What it will not do
- Video and GIFs. A video post publishes a poster frame on a different host, and
that host has no size ladder. These are image tools.
- Protected accounts. A protected post is not public and publishes nothing.
No account, no access — which is the correct behaviour, not a limitation to route around.
- Whole timelines. One post at a time. Walking an account's media tab is scraping,
and X's terms of service have a view on it.
What you may do with the file
The photo belongs to whoever posted it. Research, reference, moodboards and commentary are ordinary uses; re-uploading somebody's picture as your own is not, and a reply crediting them afterwards is not a licence granted in advance.
When you are writing about a post rather than using its picture, quoting the post itself is both better practice and better content — it carries the author's name, and it stays correct if they edit or delete. The social media embed code generator produces X's own embed markup for that.
What is the difference between `large` and `orig`?
large fits the photo inside 2048 pixels. orig is the file as uploaded, at whatever size that was. When the upload was smaller than 2048, they are the same picture.Do old twitter.com links still work?
Yes, and so does the older
.jpg:large image URL form. Both resolve to the same thing.Can I download the video from a post?
Not with this. What comes back for a video post is its cover frame.
Nothing came back for my post link.
X answered with a sign-in interstitial. Open the photo in your browser, copy its
pbs.twimg.com address, and paste that instead.Paste a post link — or the image address itself — into the X image downloader to get every size at once, or read the full guide to downloading social media images for how the other platforms compare.
Put it to work
Tools for the job you just read about
Free to run, most of them without an account.
FreeImages & video
X Image Downloader
Every size of a photo on X, including the original the app never shows.
Download →2 runs
FreePreviews
Google SERP Snippet Preview
See your title and description as a Google result — on a desktop and a phone.
Preview →5 runs
FreeUtilities
Social Media URL Cleaner
Strip the tracking off a link — and see what each parameter was telling somebody.
Clean →1 runs
FreeAnalytics & growth
Instagram Money Calculator
What to charge for a post — priced the way a brand actually prices it.
Calculate →
FreeUtilities
Username Availability Checker
One handle, checked against every network’s rules at once.
Check →
FreeUtilities
YouTube Metadata Viewer
Every field a YouTube video declares about itself, in one table.
View metadata →
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