Before Twitter’s Native Photos Came Out, Twitpic Had 46 Percent Market Share

Earlier this week–before Twitter came onto the scene with its own native photo-sharing feature–Twitpic accounted for 45.7 percent of all photos posted in tweets, with Imageshack’s Yfrog chipping in 29.3 percent.

Twitter’s new photo-hosting capability, which is powered by Photobucket, will at least partially displace the companies that have already been doing this for years. Mobile users will need to continue to use other options; the new Twitter photo stuff is Web-only for now.

To mark the change, social media monitoring company Sysomos measured the market shares of various photo-sharing services on May 30.

Only 1.25 percent of tweets contain links to photo-sharing sites, though Twitter is so huge that amounts to 2.1 million photo tweets per day.

Following Twitpic and Yfrog, Lockerz (formerly Plixi) had 17.4 percent, Instagram 5.2 percent, and Flickr 2.1 percent.

Yfrog has been in the news this week for hosting the lewd image that New York Congressman Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account tweeted and quickly deleted (the incident has been gleefully dubbed Weinergate). Weiner has said he didn’t send the image, and reports suggest that it may have been sent through a weakness in Yfrog’s system that allowed people to upload photos by sending them to an easily guessable personalized Yfrog email account.