Jun 2, 2011 08:11 GMT  ·  By

Twitter has unveiled its new photo service and it's a bit different from what most people expected. Twitter will indeed enable users to upload photos from the site and official apps and have them displayed inline, but will not be hosting the photos itself, Photobucket will take care of that behind the scenes.

"Millions of people share photos on Twitter every day. We're going to make that easier than ever. Over the next several weeks, we'll be releasing a feature to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet right from Twitter.com," Twitter Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey writes.

"And of course, you'll soon be able to easily do this from all of our official mobile apps. A special thanks to our partner Photobucket for hosting these photos behind the scenes," he explained.

Rumors of a new photo sharing service from Twitter surfaced earlier this week and the company has now confirmed the move. Photos won't be a stand-alone feature for Twitter, rather the functionality will be integrated into the service.

When writing a new tweet, users will now get the option of attaching a photo to it. The photo is uploaded to the Photobucket servers, but the process is completely opaque to the user, everything happens on Twitter or in the app.

Normally, users have to upload photos to a third-party service and insert the links in the tweets. This requires several steps and moving between a couple of sites, even with dedicated services such as Twitpic.

The move makes the whole process simpler for users, but it does make life harder for third parties. Twitter hasn't been handling its developer relations very well lately.

Some tension is understandable since Twitter is moving into areas covered by others, but it isn't doing a very good job communicating its intentions, for example Twitpic had no idea of Twitter's plans, despite the fact that other companies were notified ahead of time.

Twitter also announced that it will enable users to send photos from their phones via MMS, as soon as it's done signing partnerships with carriers around the world.