Image size for products

While adding an image to one of my products, I noticed that next to the 'add image' button is this - " Images should be 625w x 465h."
The guide to editing images, here -
https://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/2284-Shop-Owner-Chall enge-Day-2-Free-Photo-Cropping-and-Editing-Tools.html
still has the old size of 674x501. Has something changed, or is this a mistake?
The image I added, @674x501, displays just fine. So I'm not about to resize all my old images.

Neil.

That's true. Image size requirements have changed!

But this isn't a big problem. Time ago, I realized that the software automatically resize the photos to this size.

There's no need to change photos' size before upload it, only proportions if you don't like there's white sides.

Thank you for flagging this! Yes, our photo sizes have changed, but don't worry, your old photos are still stored at their original size, and should display correctly. New photos however can be that size.

I'll will correct the tutorial and am grateful you noticed!

Cheers

Well this is not true.

If you go to my shop you will see several photos which used to display just fine and are now completely ******!

It is nice that you have your ideas about how things should be displayed, and maybe even correct that you can stipulate photo size going forward, but to arbitrarily mess up my shop photos (and presumably some other people's too) is simply not correct.

Hi @AmLachDesigns,

You are right that it's not okay to arbitrarily change your photos.

Upon taking a closer look, your photos were not actually affected by the image size change (that happened a few weeks ago) but by the new "crop to fill" feature on product photos. In an effort to make the shopper experience cleaner, we adjusted images to fill space, and subsequently, in cases such as yours, negatively impacted the appearance of the product.

For this, we are sorry. I've taken a screen shot of your shop and have passed on the feedback to our product and design team. Thank you, as always, for your feedback.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

My pictures are still messed up - are you going to fix them?

Hi @AmLachDesigns,

Henrik, who leads our design team here at Shapeways is going to pop in and share his thoughts/our motivations for the change, stand by

Well, I look forward to that, but he's going to have a hard time convincing me that any changes made should affect extant photos.

*pop* Baby's asleep, I can finally chime in.
AmLachDesigns: I'm sorry to hear that few of your images got messed up. This was a calculated risk we knew going in. On the upside, we have a strong product presentation across the board, ultimately leading to more sales for the whole community. I hope you can hear me out.

The presentation of your products doesn't happen in isolation at Shapeways. Like houses on a street, if yours is the only shiny one on a rundown street, your property seems shady no matter what. You really want your neighbours to have blossoming gardens and fresh paint to bring up the property value.

Your Shapeways shop page is a place where you fully control the "neighbours" of your product. But we want to show your products across our site: in search, on the home page, at category pages, feeds, wish lists, newsletters, and on and on. We want to make sure your products are shown in a company that strengthens each other, even when you can't choose your neighbours. We want to drive up the "property value" for everyone and our team actively works to make all properties, prime properties.

This is where the image change comes in, because images are the primary way products are present and perceived on Shapeways. We want to make sure that your carefully crafted images are presented next to other equally professionally looking images. Fitting nifty to the given frame is a first sign of that professionalism. We want to ensure your product, along with all the other products on the page, line up—neatly like in a clean room. When the placements are sharp, we can strip away visual scaffoldings and let images stand on their own, and really stand out. The diminished visual noise will add more breathing room between products. Just like the calmness and space you see in high-end show rooms. The clarity continues from listings to individual product pages, where now your pictures, material options and the buy button stand out in their clear spaces ready to be clicked. No additional framings, no shining white bars that create noise.

Going into this change, about 95% of the images didn't correctly fit in their frames. Almost every where you looked on Shapeways you saw white bars and products jumping up, down, left and right when listed together. Not the fancy neighbours, the prime properties you want for your products. We saw two mistakes we've made in the past that created this.

First, we were asking for a weird size: 674x501! We wanted these numbers to be easier to punch in while preserving the aspect ratio so previously fitted images wouldn't break. The new 625x465 adds some logic and gives breathing room on the product page we were looking for. Second mistake was shrinking and adding white bars on the image. Vertical images got especially small. Here the fix was to help designers fit images to the given frame, if they didn't care about dimensions while uploading. Usually cameras take horizontal 4:3 aspect ratio pictures, so images should often fit naturally. We kept the decision to add the white frames to images that are clearly smaller than 625x465. Scaling these tiny images up would blur them, and that wouldn't be professional either.

Our calculated risk laid in vertical and square images, where the product were placed away from the center: top or bottom. Overall the percentage of these images were in single digits. Compared to the 95% of broken images, this was a choice we were ready to make. Feel free to blame me for it.

Looking at your products, Heart Cage Bracelets (http://shpws.me/q7VA) stay unchanged because the images are too small for us to scale up without blurring them. Your beautiful Heart Cage Pedant (http://shpws.me/oB7H) however is hurt by the change. Our team wholeheartedly wants to offer better tools for managing content as we go forward, but right now I can only offer you the tools we have today. Luckily one of them is the classic photo editing. I've attached right sized images of the Heart Cage Pedant for you to update on the product page.

Transitions are always tough. I'm positive we will all reap the benefits when we get over this initial hump and into the beautiful neighbourhood.
</megamail> sorry

Hi Henrik,

thanks for your long and in-depth post.

I will try and respond to the points you have made.

Your extended metaphor about neighbours and streets on the surface seems appropriate, but on reflection is really just a way of saying that my photos do not live up to your aspirational standards. You clearly have a (highly subjective) vision for how you wish SW to look, and that would be fine if you were dealing with SW shops and SW products but you are not: we are the designers, they are our models and our shops. You should concentrate on providing a decent framework that allows us to be individual and different and also try to fix the shop set-up software - that has been substandard for a very long time now, but SW always finds something more important to change/mess-up first.

It's kind of you to offer 3 amended photos, but:
a) I have many more products in my shop where the photos are not correct;
b) Each product may have several photos affected - I haven't checked yet;
c) If I can make my models in Blender I think I can crop my own (apparently substandard) photos;

If SW wishes to change the standards for photos going forward, that is your prerogative (obviously), but to change existing photos is unacceptable imo, especially when it is done without informing shopkeepers that it is being done. I cannot imagine how many shops have been messed up by this change, with absentee shopkeepers remaining blissfully unaware.

I have been with SW long enough to know that nothing will change as a result of my rant, but I feel better now...

Thanks




Calculated risk.

Yes indeed, so I will add some of my rants.
(and we two are nearly shop owners from the beginning)

Oncemore ended a session where SW has cropped my items out of the photo.

To me this idea that the item has to be in the middle of a photo to be not cropped away is annoying and makes ma a lot of troubles and additional work.
(and it completely works against shop owners working on their shops)

God bless that Monthy Python is reunified so I can say (a lttle bit changed): I hate it! I hate it! Aaargh! Aaargh!

By the way: a correct implementation of this feature would save the uploaded picture as it is, laying a default frame of your desired size on a default position and afterwards giving the user the possibility to reposition (resize) the frame.