When I select a picture for a possible pokestop then the Pokemon Go app crops the picture when showing it in the app. When looking under “Contributions” on wayfarer, then the full non-cropped image is shown.
It looks like the app crops the picture to be square. But pokestops pictures can be shown full screen and most phones have a rectangular screen. Is it fine to submit this photo or do i need to capture the photo more zoomed out so a square crop contains the entire “H3” text?
This isn’t a bug or tech issue, as this is how PoGo crops photos during the nomination process. Wayfarer doesn’t crop images, and Ingress has turned off the ability to submit at this time. The full size photo will be in the database, though, not the cropped version you see while submitting, hence why they are uncropped in Contribution Management.
Yes, PoGo tends to crop photos squarely, so that it can fit within the stop/gym spin circle. It would be up to PoGo to change these crop dimensions, not Wayfarer, as Wayfarer just provides the photos. It appears to be a 3 wide x 4 length aspect ratio on the submission screen, but the actual ratio may be different for the disks in PoGo, since they are round, not square.
There are no requirements for whether a photo for a Wayspot nomination or photo edit is cropped to look the best in a certain game. I personally crop my photos to remove any foreground/background that’s unneeded or to better center the POI. Some do care about how the photos look in each game, but there’s also no guarantee that the photos submitted to be best for one game will be the main photos in said game.
Hello, welcome to the forum! The preview shown to you in Pokémon GO is not actually a crop. If you click on it at the stage you show in your screenshot, you will see the same photo that actually went to Wayfarer. That is a bit of an unfortunate display as people frequently miss fingers and other extraneous objects in their photos because of this Pokémon GO preview.
The games that have used wayspots from Wayfarer so far all have different photo displays (just to give a few examples: the Pokéstop disc and the gift preview in Pokémon GO look very different, and so do the portal view and the key view in Ingress), all of these show the original photo slightly differently and unfortunately they don’t handle all photo formats well (think of some Pokémon GO gifts that display the photo in an ugly stretched way - through no fault of the submitter).
You don’t have to engage in this, but the photo aspect ratio that has been found to work most efficiently in Pokémon GO to reduce the ugly stretches is 1:1, so if you are mostly interested in this game, you could follow this community observation. Ingress views tend to be a little more landscapey, but is not hurt by the square format either, provided the object isn’t photographed with a huge close-up. Also note that these two games can have different main photos.
I hope this helps plan your photo cropping a little. Note that of course, these are community “hacks” stemming from how this has worked for many years, but of course the games could update their visual photo handling at any time.
Different Niantic games crop the image in different ways, but in my opinion the best results are a 1:1 ratio with the focal point of the wayspot in the centre. If possible leave a border around the object to reduce cropping, but not at the expense of including things like people, number plates etc. For example:
Not all objects fit nicely into a 1:1 space though, if it’s a difficult object then make sure that the main focus of the wayspot is in the centre - for example, the most recognisable part of a building. A common mistake is to use 16:9 ratio and then have the focal point off to the side or top/bottom, and that leads to it being cropped out.
