After more than two months of beta testing among its users, Twitter announced on Aug. 10 that Twitter Images was available to the masses.

Making third-party applications such as TwitPic and yfrog unnecessary, Twitter’s new photo-sharing services enable users to add images of up to 3MB in size to a tweet by clicking the camera icon at the bottom of the page. The image appears as a thumbnail in the feed, but can be enlarged on the right-hand side of the page.

The main difference from previous photo-sharing apps is that photos will now be stored through Twitter Images and powered by Photobucket. Apparently, however, the size of the photo may affect the number of characters that can be included with each tweet.

Mobile compatibility and image galleries are expected to be integrated later this fall.

An important copyright note for pro photographers: Twitter’s terms of service still give the company the right to use all content and images.