Twitter launched the new tool on 9 August and it allows Twitter users to post photographs within the body of a tweet by clicking on the camera icon below the text box. A company called Photobucket will host all the photos uploaded.

The icon automatically directs Twitter users to their saved files, allowing them to browse their images and upload the photo of their choice. 

The ‘in-house’ photo-sharing option does not, however, stop Twitter users from using third party photo-sharing services such as Twitpic or yFrog. The new option will however, come as a blow to these companies who have to date, only faced competition from other third-party websites and not Twitter itself.

Twitter’s Chief Executive Dick Costolo announced the photo-sharing service earlier this year at an American technology conference.

He said that the service will “remove the friction from adding photos to tweets."

At the moment only certain users will have the new camera icon on their profile as the roll out is going to be gradual. It is also only available via the web version on Twitter – it is not yet known when the mobile version of the photo-sharing facility will be rolled out.

For users concerned about the privacy of their photos, Twitter has said it will remove all EXIF (exchangeable image file) data from all photos uploaded, which is the meta data that appears on every photo taken by a digital camera, (such as the date and time of the photo). However, all photos posted on Twitter are not private, and even when a tweet is a deleted, could be cached in some browsers and servers.

The site has also announced that in due course will compile galleries of all users’ photos shared on the service via the Twitter camera button.