Though Twitter originally started off as a 140-character text messaging service, images are now an integral part of the overall Twitter experience. Unfortunately, Twitter’s own iPhone and iPad apps have failed to cash in on the photo discovery aspect. So, how do you search for images and videos that are shared by Twitter users?
While the App Store has hundreds of photo and video discovery apps for Facebook, I couldn’t find a single such app for Twitter till last year. Earlier this month, I gave it another shot and I found SnapNest - an app which claims to offer photo discovery capabilities for Twitter. The app’s tagline “See whats happening…” made me believe that SnapNest will let me view images related to any topic or trend.
SnapNest is free so I had no hesitation in installing it on my iPhone. Once installed, the app shows a list of currently trending topics and another section where you can search for images of your choice.
You can search for any topic that interests you. I searched for ‘sunset’ and the app provided a grid view of all sunset images pulled off Twitter.
You can click on any image in the grid view to display it as shown below.
SnapNest also shows the associated tweet and lets you save the image to your camera roll or share it via email. You can view full high quality versions of the images by pinching and zooming.
If you want to know what’s happening around you, SnapNest can find photos taken near to your location.
The best part about SnapNest – I love the way it updates my search results in real time and even lets me pause my search to make sure no new results are added. SnapNest is available both for the iPhone and the iPad. Although SnapNest works as described, it would be great if future versions of the app offer more additional features.
If you’re aware of any other way to do a real time image search on Twitter using your iPhone or iPad, please let us know about it.
