With the announcement this week that Twitter is going to start integrating photo sharing into their website, a lot of users seemed to realize all of a sudden that they didn't actually realize that you could post images on Twitter. To make matters worse, after making the announcement that Twitter photo sharing was in development, Twitter removed the old instructions about how to post pictures on Twitter from their website in preparation for the eventual launch of their own Twitter image sharing features. However, since those features aren't out yet, there are a lot of users out there who don't know how to post photos on Twitter, and who don't have the resources to figure out Twitter image sharing on their own. We thought we'd take a moment to show users how you can share photos on Twitter.

1. Post Photos to Twitter From Your Twitter Client.

If you're using one of the many Adobe Air-based Twitter clients like the ever-popular Tweetdeck, posting images to Twitter is a snap. Simply find your Twitter client's "embed photo" or "upload photo" button (usually shown near the tweet box), click it, and browse around your PC until you find the photo to upload. Your Twitter client will take care of uploading the photo to a Twitter image-sharing website like Twitpic or YFrog, will shorten the URL of the image for you, and will embed the link to the image into your Tweet. Even better, many such Twitter clients can also read the shortened image URL's in tweets, actually showing the destination images in the content of the tweet itself.

2. Share Photos on Twitter Using a Twitter Image Sharing Service

There are tons of third-party sites out there designed specifically to answer the question "How do I post pictures on Twitter." Among the most well-known are Twitpic and YFrog. Basically, the way these Twitter image sharing websites work is that you log into the third-party site using your Twitter username and password and upload your photos through the web browser. Once you've uploaded your photo to the third-party website, you can actually tweet the photo directly from the image sharing service, or you can get a short URL of the image which you can copy and paste into your own tweet. Some of the advantages of Twitter image sharing services is that many of them allow users to make non-Twitter comments, and nearly all of them will show you how many hits your image has received from Twitter users - a very useful feature.

3. Post Photos to Twitter From Your Mobile Phone

It's actually much easier to post images on Twitter from your mobile phone than you might think. Since many people are using smartphones (iPhone, Android, Windows 7, etc), there are native applications for many smartphones that you can use to upload images directly from your phone and share them on Twitter. What's more, most of the third-party Twitter clients on the iPhone, Android, and other smartphone platforms also feature the same image sharing features that their desktop counterparts do, meaning that sharing your images on Twitter is as easy as point, click, and then click a few more times. For those people who have a camera on their phone but who don't actually have an application platform, all's not lost - there are MMS-to-Twitter and Email-to-Twitter gateways (for example, Mobypicture) that will allow you to send a photo via MMS or Email which will then be posted to Twitter on your behalf.

In the end, it's the user's choice which method they want to use to post images on Twitter. Although Twitter will soon be launching their own built-in photo sharing service, powered by Photobucket, that doesn't mean that third-party sites are going to disappear right away; in fact, the simple merit of the fact that so many photos have already been posted to Twitter using these services should keep them around for a while.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there, take some photos, and share those images on Twitter!