How can I save a Twitter image as a PNG? The image in question is only on the artist's Twitter, but I can't figure out how to save the image as a PNG as opposed to a JPEG. Can someone with experience in this field help me out, please?

Download the image and open it in a graphics program such as the GIMP, then export or save (depending on how the program works) the picture as a .png instead of a .jpg. You can then delete the .jpg in favor of keeping the .png.

garfieldfromgarfield said:
How can I save a Twitter image as a PNG? The image in question is only on the artist's Twitter, but I can't figure out how to save the image as a PNG as opposed to a JPEG. Can someone with experience in this field help me out, please?

You can't get png files out of twitter unless they were uploaded as a png file, and even then twitter will turn most pngs into jpegs. There is no way to get the file quality back once this has been done. Converting a jpeg into a png just makes the file size larger and preserves the compression, it doesn't reverse the quality loss.

See https://e621.net/wiki_pages/26055#twitter for more on how to obtain the highest quality image off of twitter.

clawstripe said:
Download the image and open it in a graphics program such as the GIMP, then export or save (depending on how the program works) the picture as a .png instead of a .jpg. You can then delete the .jpg in favor of keeping the .png.

Noooooooooooooo. This is how we get jpg -> png conversions on the site, we don't want these.

how can I find out if the image was uploaded to twitter as a png?

garfieldfromgarfield said:
how can I find out if the image was uploaded to twitter as a png?

The url it gives you for the image when right clicking it will be a png.

clawstripe said:
Download the image and open it in a graphics program such as the GIMP, then export or save (depending on how the program works) the picture as a .png instead of a .jpg. You can then delete the .jpg in favor of keeping the .png.

While this is technically how to do it... never fucking do this for any reason!
Like Kira said, only thing happens is quality stays the same, but filesize is now bloated to hell and saving it back to JPG results generation loss. so it's pretty much lose/lose situation.

There has been cases where I have needed or wanted to have image from twitter to use as e.g. background, in these cases it's better idea to denoise the image (you can find photoshop tutorials, waifu2x can also do this) and after denoising saving it as PNG to avoid further quality loss. However in these cases just keep the copies in personal use only, there was user doing this on the site and that kind of situation required no less than three dedicated users to find and fix these uploads aka huge waste of everyones time for something someone though was good idea.

kiranoot said:
You can't get png files out of twitter unless they were uploaded as a png file, and even then twitter will turn most pngs into jpegs. There is no way to get the file quality back once this has been done. Converting a jpeg into a png just makes the file size larger and preserves the compression, it doesn't reverse the quality loss.

See https://e621.net/wiki_pages/26055#twitter for more on how to obtain the highest quality image off of twitter.

Before start of this year, PNG required at least single transparent pixel for Twitter to keep it as PNG and many artists utilized this loophole to keep quality of their uploads higher. As twitter doesn't alter files afterwards, there can be a lot of PNG files before this time.
Uploads after that needs to be either 900px max in dimension or 256 colors using image. Additionally because of photographers requesting it, twitter also keeps JPG files as original quality as long as they are under 4096px in dimensions, so sometimes JPG files on Twitter are nearly as good as PNG files these days.

So tons of ifs and butts so it's extremely hard to give yes/no answers to questions like "will this upload be PNG or JPG"

Have been instructing artists to simply save as 100 quality JPG or utilize something like Pingo to reduce colors with palette when uploading to upkeep quality (as Pingos palette generation and useage seems almost surreal and far better from GIMP or ffmpeg), see post #2250093 comments.

garfieldfromgarfield said:
how can I find out if the image was uploaded to twitter as a png?

forum #279644
TL;DR: just change the sample to orig and use that. The wiki page kira linked has link to current best user script which can do this automatically for you.