Cropped photos
Can't there be an option to see the whole picture? It's always cropped, first in height, then if you want to view full screen in width. I played the old ingress years ago and liked it very much to see the photo rather big immediately. This is taste of course. I like to identify with the portal and not hack just blue, white and green points on the map.
But if I want to view photos and see the full picture to see how it was back then and how good the photo is and so on.. Why is it cropped? Why make it worse? And also if you view it full screen you could swipe to the next one back then. Now I have to go out to the little gallery, tap on the next picture and then up and on full screen again. I can't even be fast with voting for my favourite picture. This is such a bad usability. And it was much better back then.
But to not be even able to watch the whole photos is just.. I can't understand why it was done.
Comments
Yeah photos of portals looked better in redacted.
I think it's due to a difference in the aspect ratio. redacted liked 16:9 but Prime shows 4:3
Redacted showed any ratio correctly and full
Yes, it allowed to show both ratios perfectly in redacted. The transition to Prime only allowed one format to show "correctly"
Sounds like a good reason to frame your photos better, and take new pictures for older portals.
but no ratio is shown correctly now. If I'm in the menu of a portal, the photo is shown horizontal while often cutting top and bottom, but if i go on fullscreen of the photo, it is cropped so that the sides are cropped, but bottom and top is there. It's just frustrating. Even if it is 4:3. At best it is shown correctly in fullscreen OR in preview.
I just cannot imagine how niantic employees were just like.. yea lets crop that. it's alright that noone can see the pictures correctly. noone cares about the portals anyway. Ah and if we're at it, lets take the option to slide the photo in fullscreen to the next photo out of the game. Noone needs that. Nobody wants the photos anyways. Portals are only game points.
Even if hardcore players don't care about the portals anymore and they are only green, blue and white points to them, what drew me to Ingress back in the day was to capture special objects and places. It was MY object as long as I held it. I immersed myself in the story of the game. I was part of it. And they made it significantly harder to do that. As they made portals less and less the objects they represent, but ever more just colour points.
And this bothers me. After they took my favourite achievement, the guardian, out of the game, because.. people who wanted everything were annoyed by it.... because it was hard to get, i still don't understand this, the connection to the portals themselves was very important to me. And as hard as I try, I can't get into the game with these usability issues. But I have not much hope for any positive changes to the photos ingame. Niantic has proven a lot of times to not care about such things. Since Pokemon Go nobody cares about Ingress anymore anyways.
The only reason I can see for cropping it was for using less data. The original images of the portals are still on the server 🤷♂️
One major issue here is that in order for the image to look good both in the keys menu and also on the portal details screen, you often have to zoom the photo out to include a bunch of space around the image subject. In my experience this tends to lead to an increase of "poor quality photo" rejections in wayfarer, but if I resubmit a nomination with the same photo cropped to the point it looks ugly in Ingress, it gets approved.
In my experience this tends to lead to an increase of "poor quality photo" rejections in wayfarer
The photo submissions aren't presented as thumbnails - it's the full photo to where you can even click the photo to see the full resolution of the photo.
Then why not making the submission of photos at this ratio initially? Right now if you submit a new portal its a hassle to make the picture so that it looks good cropped. Can't Ingress at least show a mask when making the photo?
What I mean is, reviewers see the photo (full scale or not) with a bunch of "whitespace" around the subject, and say "they should have zoomed in more", then reject because they think the picture was not taken close enough.
I shouldn't have to try and imagine how the photo will show in the game when taking it apart from obvious that the object is in the frame.
Even allowing generous margins you often get heads cut off statues etc.
I take a lot of photos for general use and know how to frame, 1/3 ratio rules etc. You can throw all that out the window for Prime.
The whole picture is there as you can see it when portal reviewed etc but Prime cuts the picture poorly.