image size ?

nita_rae

The help page for catalog images mentions they can be up to 8MB (file size), but I see nothing about the dimensions (H+W). Is there a minimum and preferred sizes ? Is orientation important, or should they be square ?

Calibrick

Nita, I have submitted hundreds of images in the past of all shapes and sizes, so there really is no preference for that I believe since the site auto-resizes them to fit the screen layout (e.g., phone, monitor). So long as it is a white background, you'll be in great shape! Plus get points for submittal that you can cash in for being featured on the home page, prizes, etc. ;-)

Jay37

When you submit a picture it is best if you crop as tightly as you can (either before uploading, or using the cropping facility on the submission page). The image will auto display in a square, irrespective of whether the item itself is taller than it is wide or vice versa.

nita_rae

@Jay37 Just so I understand this clearly (and because I saw a different site do the wrong thing) ... If the picture is not square (i.e. it is landscape or portrait), it will make the picture square by filling the shorter dimension with white space ? The site I saw doing it wrong, took a rectangular image and cropped the long dimension to make it square. Some of the results did not look good.

mfav

To answer your question specifically, yes.

I typically shoot minifigures at stupid large and then crop tight to 800 pixels on the long axis. Smaller undecorated things I will upload usually at 400 pixels minimum on the long axis (do we really need an 800 pixel wide 1x2 tile?). The site seems to resize an over-700-pixel image down to 700 pixels on the long axis and will center and pad the balance with white to 700 on the other axis. Smaller images I think end up floating in the center of a 700x700 white square. Reference the Castle > Forestmen (most of those are mine) [full] and 85945 [float]…the large images on the product detail page. The images are also sized down for the thumbnails, but pretty much the same thing except at 135px. Thumbnail images are long-axis edge-to-edge 135 and the shorter dimension is filled with white. The thumbnails are not 700x700 floating padded images stupidly resized. They are intelligently separately sized.

This information is based on observation, knowing what size I've uploaded things and how they end up when they get posted on site. If you want actual conversion specs, you should ask Lawrence.

Hope that makes sense.