Full screen photos problem?
CopperCog-ING
Posts: 29 ✭✭
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of photos that was taken in full screen mode, not 4:3 or 16:9. They capture very poorly for photo discs. Attached is a photo from a subbed soccer field. Tried to imagine it as a pokestop, and you wouldn’t see much.
Anyone else experiencing this? Should we allow photos like this, or should Niantic limit what formats can be used?
Comments
If Niantic didn't want such photos they could reject them automatically when they are submitted.
Given that you can see the photo it means that it's OK for them, so you shouldn't reject it due to the aspect ratio.
Landscape and portrait photos are severely cropped. I would think a non-standard shaped picture would also just be chopped to the desired shape. A standard (portrait) picture gets around a third chopped off the top, and some off the bottom. Landscape-oriented get about 20% off each side.
Niantic crops to many results - all different:
There's also the image shown to reviewers - which may be the original dimensions.
Last time I paid attention making a nomination in PoGO it used my phone default resolution, which was "full." It would be ridiculously easy to do that without noticing, and the in-game preview crops the edges a bit. Honest "mistake" that isn't even a mistake.
The photo is acceptable. Somebody else can add a photo contribution at a later time if they want to make it look better in their game of choice.
Not saying this is the nominators fault at all. I’m just noticing how these are harder to get well. Maybe a solution would be to have a crop square when nominating, so everyone submits the same size (aka instagram.)
Declining because of this isn’t something I do, unless it is a legitimate bad photo not showing the sub in question.
The nomination process shows you a cropped picture. It's not AS cropped as it will be in-game, but it's a clue.
With the fact we can submit from gallery and a lot of phones are getting longer, portrait photos like that are gon a happen all the time, mine do that cause my phone is 3 inches wide but 15 inches long
I now submit all photographs as squares.
As far as I can tell, the way that the image gets delivered to the games (Pokemon Go and Ingress) is it sends an image which is resized down to a max height/width of 512 pixels. If the image is square then it ends up 512x512, otherwise the shorter edge will be <512 pixels. This is the image that also appears on Ingress Intel. That resized image then gets cropped or resized by the various games rather than the original resolution image.
This means the image in the OP would be resized to approx. 235x512 pixels. When viewing, for example, the Ingress key, which would show the entire width of the image, that's going to look blurrier than other photos because the image has only half the horizontal resolution as keys which are square. The Pokemon Go photodisc also would come from that image which is scaled down horizontally and would look blurrier as a result. So in this case, it's not just a case of the extra height being negligible because it is cropped off -- it affects the resolution of the cropped photo too.
I have a landscape photo of a mural which is scaled to 512x131 pixels, and it looks really disappointing in game because of the poor resolution on the vertical.
If instead the images were scaled to have the smallest side be 512 pixels then non-square aspect ratios would not cause a decrease in image quality.
(Submitting square photos also fixes the issue of the games having multiple issues where they do not preserve aspect ratio and will squish images into square shapes when they aren't square. This includes gift images in Pokemon Go and the portal disambiguation previews in Ingress when you click on a dense portal area.)