You can now crop any image you plan to upload directly in Mapmaker before you save it. Our new image cropping tool lets you adjust any image – whether it’s a location photo, cover, profile picture, or part of a Viator submission.
All you need to do is follow these easy steps:
Click Choose File(s) to select your image, which will appear in the Edit Image pop-up window
Use the crop handles to select the portion of the image you want to keep, moving the frame around to find the spot you want to focus on. (The crop handles are set to the recommended dimensions for the specific type of image you’re uploading.)
Adjust your image as needed, zooming in or out and straightening the image using the sliders on the right side of the editor.
Click Save to apply your crop
The cropping tool is especially useful when you want to highlight specific details or remove unnecessary elements from your photos. For best results, try to maintain the recommended dimensions for the specific images. You’ll find a complete reference of all image sizes used across VoiceMap, on our list of all image sizes.
The new image cropping tool provides some interesting new features, but we’re having a few issues with it. We normally take the photos on an iPhone in square format. This gives two options when it comes to downloading them jpeg or heic.
Jpeg format
If we use this, the width of the square image is less than 2048px (the minimum requirement), so we get an error message.
Theoretically, if we took them in normal landscape they would be exactly 2048px wide, but this does not leave any margin of error for editing. We quite often need to straighten them on the phone, which reduces the width slightly once downloaded.
Heic format
Here we have the opposite problem – the native width is too large, so we need to resize the image and convert to jpeg before uploading. This is fine, but it does add an extra step.
Also, when we upload, the default crop is smaller than the actual image, so we need to manually expand all four corners – again it just takes a bit of extra time. I know it doesn’t sound like much extra work, but with 50-100 images per tour it adds up a bit.
Previously, we could just upload the square jpeg images directly, which we found easier. Is it possible to allow square photos to be smaller – usually ours are 1770px, but possibly down to about 1600px to give a bit of margin? This would allow us to download in jpeg format, avoiding the need for resizing before uploading.
Also, when uploading, could the default for the image crop be the full image, with the possibility of dragging the handles inwards if necessary?
You’re welcome, I was busy on the forum with something else hence the quick response but also, posting questions like this on the forum helps because another publisher might have the answer or the same question. So, thank you!
If the crop was full width, I suspect nobody would notice it.
The image dimensions are set so that images won’t be pixelated on an iPad. Anything smaller will – and these requirements only go up as cameras get better and screen resolutions increase. So I’d be reluctant to decrease the requirement.
One solution might be to allow HEIC uploads. We’ll look into that.
Thanks for getting back to me, Iain. We have iPhone 13s, and the native resolution is more than high enough. But when downloading to a Windows computer from iCloud Photos, we can choose between “highest quality”, in which case they get downloaded as HEIC files, or “most compatible”, in which case they are lower resolution jpegs. Anyway, if we could upload HEIC files directly, that would be a great solution.
Speaking of photos, we have another question, this time about the photos for the Viator listing. We think the aspect ratio has changed, so they need to be more panoramic. We used to do them in standard landscape (4:3) format, but that’s too square now. Are they supposed to be 16:9?
In the narrow streets and small squares of Andalucia, it can be a bit tricky to get photos of someone doing the tour and the landmark with that ratio. For example here it’s hard to fit both me and the church spire on.
