Tiny portal photos in Prime and a lost sense of exploration

vimdixvimdix ✭✭
edited March 2020 in App Feedback (Archive)

I miss the large portal photos. The tiny pics in Prime make it feel like what the portals are doesn't even matter.

I was recently on holiday. I love to take "Ingress vacations" - that is, going to new places with only a handful of mission banners as my guideline, ticking up my uniques counter, and being happily surprised by seeing something new I haven't already scoped out online.

But this time, I found far fewer photos of cool portals in my camera roll at the end of it.

So many times in the past, I would open a portal and be immediately struck by the photo - "wow, that looks cool", followed by looking up and searching for the portal. And then often heatsinking the portal to pick up a key after the fact! It was these surprising, serendipitous finds that made me glad to be exploring while playing Ingress.

But the tiny photo in Ingress Prime kills this sort of serendipitous exploration. There's no way to tell if something looks cool with that tiny square.

The monochrome blurry fireplace rendition doesn't help either. Nor does the fact that most photos were taken with the vertical alignment from Redacted in mind - they often translate poorly to the square view on the portal page, and even worse to the horizontal view in the portal photos list/key locker scroll.

It made me sad, thinking about coming home on past trips with lockers full of souvenir keys of happy memories and interesting art I'd want to show people. This time, the only souvenir keys I got were from places I knew were landmarks already.

I wonder if others feel similarly -- that the portal photo deserves a little more love in Prime.


p.s. #myfaveportal

(because it reminds me of katamari damacy, and because I made L16 for the second time here ^^ outside osaka station)

Comments

  • HydracyanHydracyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    It actually clip every time. The best way to deal is always taking vertical photos, but knowing that the portal key will clip it to widescreen, and center it, so it will be perfectly cliped, and then on full view with almost no clip (it still clip a bit).

    Or just take landscape pictures well centered, and dont give a thing about the outcomes.

  • I agree so much! Besides the bad usability of prime and that it now sucks out my power like Pokémon go and is laggy, it shows my portal keys in such a worse way than in redacted. But the main problem I have with prime is this here and I am so sad to know that there won't be changes to this.

    The special part of ingress to me was finding cool things and conquer THEM. Now I don't see what I'm conquering. It was so beautifully made in original Ingress. I want to see big pictures and I want to swipe them like in original and I don't want them to be this zoomed in I already had a problem with in Pokémon go. I just don't understand... Why take away the special part of ingress the photos. Contrary to Pokémon go, ingress really is about the objects and they simply... Took that away. I don't want to make points on the map green or blue, I want to conquer THEM. I see why so many gave up on ingress.. Like this it's just not the same anymore.

  • I realy haven't though on this but it is spot on. When i visit a new place i always used ingress to look arround, and this was true on redacted. I could see the images and find the portal very easy and fast.

    With prime, in new places it's a dot on the screen and i(we) lost the felling that the portal is ours.

    A new portal is a dot on the screen with resos to fill, and not a statue or fountain that i have never seen and that i pass by every day.

    That's exactly why i lost interest with prime, the uniqueness was lost. Not the same game.

  • edited September 2020

    Originally the "large" version was in the flames of the portal. But that's a horrible idea that we finally convinced them to remove.

    I completely agree about the visual image to environment disconnect too.

  • Anyone else reading this with #sadchuckle the irony of receiving rejections for "poor quality images" (also, late afternoon sun is not "pitch black"!) in WayFarer? Sure, there's a guide on how to take a good picture and there's a lot of gatekeeping involved before your great picture gets added to the Network... But it will only be seen in game (after some crop/stretch mangling) only if the agent is curious enough to jump through even more hoops than before.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    I also miss the bigger image on portals, now its so small u dont even bother look at it as it doesnt feel like it matters anymore....

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