Bluesky is beefing up its social network as a better place to post photos. Late Wednesday, the company announced a new version of its app (version 1.121), which boosts the quality of images in posts both in terms of upload size and resolution.
Before, Bluesky only supported photo uploads of 1MB or less. Now, that limit has doubled to 2MB. In addition, photos will render at up to 4000px, instead of 2000x, as before.
In addition, the company replaced its old image grid with a swipeable carousel that can handle mixed aspect ratios without cropping. (Although early feedback from some Bluesky users indicates that they would prefer the choice between posting as a grid or carousel.)
The changes could make Bluesky’s app more competitive with other social networks, like X or Meta’s Threads.
The latter became well known after its launch as a showcase for photos, thanks to its support for a variety of aspect ratios and its carousel, which offered clever ways to split up larger photos for viewing in this way. In fact, it even inspired a developer to create a standalone app to help users post their panoramic photos to Threads. (Threads still supports a larger maximum image size, though it isn’t published in Threads’ documentation.)