Found out most galleries crop your digital art without telling you

I uploaded a piece to a popular online gallery last week and noticed my edges looked chopped off. Checked their specs and they auto-crop anything outside a 16:9 ratio even if you upload in a different format. I lost like 15% of my painting on each side without realizing it. Found this fact buried in their help docs page 3. Now I measure my canvas to fit their exact ratio before I even start drawing. It drove me crazy seeing my details get cut. Has anyone else had their art messed up by weird gallery size limits?

3 comments

3 Comments

emery_craig28d ago

That's REALLY frustrating and honestly it feels like they're tricking you on purpose. You'd think a gallery that's all about showing off art would at least warn you before chopping it up. I had a similar thing happen with a print-on-demand site where they just silently trimmed my whole composition to fit their stupid templates and I didn't notice until the proofs arrived. It's like they expect every artist to read every tiny line of their Terms of Service which nobody does. The worst part is these size limits were probably decided by some developer who never actually looked at a painting in their life.

ivanjones28d ago

Yeah that "expect every artist to read every tiny line" part really hits home @emery_craig. Did you end up getting any kind of refund or reprint from that print-on-demand site? I'm curious because I've seen places like that basically hide the crop info in paragraph 14 of their policies. Makes you wonder how many artists just eat the loss and move on instead of fighting it.

diana15518d ago

It's not like they're hiding treasure maps, just read the damn policies lol.