FM4 Forzatography Help and Tips [Wiki]

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Contents

Post 1: Basic introduction
 • Intro
• Useful info/tips for beginners
• How to post your photos
• Forum signatures
• Useful links
Post 2: Detailed settings guide
• Shutter speed
• Focus
• Aperture
• Exposure
• Contrast
• Colour
• Brightness
• Sepia
• Vignette
• My default settings
Post 3: General tips & tricks / Photography Tips
• Photoshoot in the pits (freely drive around)
• Slammed/stanced photos
• Wingless look
• Interior shots
• “Filters”

• Wide angle shots
• The rule of thirds
Post 4: Photo locations and specific tutorials
• Location 1 - Top Gear - Realism & reflections

• Location 2 - Mugello - Very artistic & realism

• Location 3 - Fujimi Kaido - Realism and dramatic lighting that’s great for reflections

Intro

Forzatography (Forza Photography) is a popular sub-culture amongst Forza players. The in-game photo mode allows you to pause time and wander around the track, and although it may not sound like an exciting addition to the game, it can be great if you enjoy photography in real life as well since you can go and shoot any car on any track in the game with the equivalent of professional camera gear at the touch of a button - a luxury few people have.

If you’re wondering how this thread will be a Wiki as stated in the title, allow me to explain. The main aim with this thread is to create the ultimate guide to Forzatography within FM4, which can be a useful introduction to Forzatography for any of the titles, but with tutorials and values aimed specifically at FM4. In order to offer the best possible information to Forzatography newbies, I quickly realised that this thread would benefit greatly from having multiple people contribute their tips, so based on the responses to this thread I will add or change any part of the guides as suggested.

The content will spread over a few posts to allow it to keep expanding if the character limit gets in the way, and to aid organisation. I’ll work to make some fancy graphics for titles eventually, and also continue to add content in the meantime.

Useful info/tips for beginners:

  • You can press the X button to focus the photo on whatever is in the circle in the centre of the screen. If you move using the left analogue stick or change the height of the camera using the triggers you’ll need to refocus, however if you move the view using the right thumbstick, the zoom or the pitch (roll) you won’t need to refocus. I know it sounds simple but this sudden realisation is what seriously improved my Forzatography.
  • Also, using zoom and moving further away from the car, or zooming out and moving closer, can both change the perspective of a photo and will help you get the background just right whilst keeping the car the same size in the shot.
  • Different heights of terrain can be useful too, as you can use the elevation to increase the maximum height the camera can reach, or get lower than the car for good low angle shots.
  • Experiment. I can’t stress this point enough, keep experimenting with your shots! Always ask yourself, “what if I tried this?” and “I wonder what that would look like?”. The moment you stop trying new things, you will stop improving. It’s all too easy to get complacent with the quality of your photos - I’ve been there too - but then each new set of photos you take become samey and you’ll enjoy it less than if you keep trying to improve.
  • Start a gallery thread on these forums and post your new shots whenever you take them. The helpful attitudes and useful critiquing you will receive will help you improve massively. This was probably the most important step in getting my shots to where they are now.
  • Some things won’t work. Learn from them. This goes well with the point above about opening a gallery thread - getting a second opinion on a new style is always useful. Don’t get bogged down though, and don’t worry if you don’t win xyz photocompetitions either - nothing good will come out of being upset. Move on, and keep having fun.
  • There’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from photos you see, although it isn’t okay to copy a photo you’ve seen. If you feel your shot is very similar to somebody else’s or you’ve taken some inspiration from a shot, it’s polite to credit the original photographer. As for taking inspiration, I find a combination of Forza photos (from Forza 4, 5 and Horizon) and real life shots (from websites like Speedhunters) as well as an automotive passion can help to come up with new ideas. And it’s not just things like the angle and framing that can inspire you - keeping up with the latest trends in your favourite car culture can give you cool ideas for cars to shoot!
  • Enjoy it! Forzatography is fun, and can introduce you to some great people.

How to post your photos

So you’ve caught the Forzatography bug, taken some photos and want to post them here on the forums. Getting the shots from the game to the forums is quite a time consuming task due to slow loading times and multiple uploading/downloading processes, but once you get used to it you’ll find the process becomes almost second nature and can be done quite quickly.

First things first, you’ll need to upload your shots to your storefront. If you didn’t upload them as you took them (i.e. after the “File saved successfully” pop up, you didn’t press A for the next pop up to upload it to your storefront, or were offline at the time) then you’ll need to go to Profile > My Media > My Photos and find the first shot you want to upload. Press A to select it, and click “Upload to storefront” from the window that appears. Fill out any info as you wish (or leave blank to save time) and press A to upload it. Repeat this process with any other photos you want to post.

Note: If you run out of slots on your storefront you will need to delete some photos that are already there. To do this, from the main menu go to Community > Storefront > My Storefront and press RB to scroll across until you get to your photos. Find a photo you want to remove from your storefront (don’t worry, it will still be stored on your hard drive if you ever wish to upload it again in the future) and select it. From the options, select the one to remove the photo from your storefront. This process is slow due to the slow menu system. It is also possible to upload photos to your storefront from this screen by selecting an empty slot and pressing A, however the game has to reload your storefront after each image so the process is slower than the method mentioned in the paragraph above.

Now that the photos you want are on your storefront, log on to FM.net and go to your gallery (if you can’t find it, here is a link). To save your photos, click one to load the full size version, and do a right click “Save As…”. I find it quicker to click each image with the mouse wheel, opening them each in a new tab, and closing each one once saved, although you might find clicking each one, going back a page and clicking the next one an easier process.

With the photos saved to your PC you’ll need to upload them to an image hosting website in order to post them on the forums. There are many out there, although the one I would recommend is Flickr. Flickr gives you 1TB of space to store your photos which is way more than you’ll ever need, and gives you access to them in a range of forum-friendly sizes as well as the ability to rotate them and perform other simple tasks. Photobucket is a good alternative if you want to upload animated GIF files, since Flickr converts every image to JPEGs. However Photobucket has slightly worse image quality than Flickr (mainly it has duller colours), so except for some forum signatures or a few other images Flickr is the best one to go for.

Having chosen your image hosting website you’ll need to create an account (free) and upload the photos you downloaded from your FM.net gallery. Once the upload has finished, go to your photostream and open a photo you want to post on the forums in a size between 500px and 800px wide. Right click on it, hit properties, and from the properties window highlight and copy the image URL. Go to your forum post, press the Insert Image button and paste the link into the dialogue box. Press OK, then press OK again on the next window that pops up and the image code will be inserted into your post where you left the cursor.

Forum signatures

You might have noticed that many users like to show off their Forza creations - be it photos or a livery - in a forum signature. If you plan to create your own then there are a few tips that’ll help you:

  • The maximum dimensions for a signature are 480px wide by 115px tall.
  • If you want to use a photo in your signature that is a different aspect ratio, crop it rather than resize it to avoid distorting the image.
  • Even basic editing software such as Gimp, pixlr, or any of the Microsoft suite of softwares can do just as good a job as Photoshop for signatures. Most of the time a minimalist signature works best.
  • The image URL may be too long for the signature character limit, and even if it isn’t it will restrict any text you have along with it. URL shorteners are useful to make sure you use the fewest characters possible. Bit.ly and Tinyurl are OK, but Google’s URL shortening service is 1 character shorter.
  • You can link your signature to your gallery thread on these forums, which may drive some extra traffic to your gallery.

Useful links

If you still have any questions about anything at all photography or Forza related, ask them below and I’ll try my best to answer - I check this thread fairly regularly.

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Now for the detail about what all of the settings do both in real life and within the realms of Forza, and ways to make the most of them. All of the values quoted are purely approximations; as always you will need to fine tune them depending on the shot and the situation, so go by your judgement of what looks best rather than sticking to the numbers below - they are just a guide.

Shutter speed

As the name states, this defines the amount of time the shutter for the camera is open. In real life, shutter speeds are primarily used to change the exposure of an image, but in Forza the main alterations are the blur of objects when the car is at a fast speed. When using it in Forza, it is best to keep it at 0 for static shots, even if the car is already stationary, as the focus will be more defined. The only exception to this that I can think of is when you try extremely small depth-of-fields in your shots, like the one below (however shutter speed only has minor effects here, so isn’t important for such shots).

When taking motion shots (where the car is moving) I would recommend either using values around 10-20 or 50-80, depending on the shot. If the background is very detailed and you cannot use much aperture, then using 50-80 shutter speed will hopefully smudge out the background enough for it to not detract attention from the focal point. However, if you want to catch the spokes of the wheels (instead of turning them into a circle full of blurred lines with no discernible wheel spokes) then a slower shutter speed is better.

Focus

If I’m honest, I find that focus makes only a negligible difference to most shots. In real life focus is extremely important, and when something is out of focus all detail will become blurred. In Forza, as long as you remember to press X to focus on the point you want to, the focus setting won’t have much effect in the majority of circumstances. Again though, one main exception are shots like the example above, with high aperture creating either bokeh in the background or giving an extremely small depth of field. In these situations setting the focus to 0 will increase the effect. It can also be used creatively when making abstract photos, however I’m not very experienced with these types of shots.

Aperture

Aperture is one of the settings that has a large impact on a shot. In real life it has several uses as it changes the depth of field but also changes the amount of light falling on the camera sensor/film, allowing either faster or slower shutter speeds depending on how it is changed. In Forza it changes the depth of field and is what gives the best bokeh.

The photo above uses a small amount of aperture, and as a result a larger range of objects are in focus, from the close up writing in the foreground to the car and pit wall in the background.

This shot however, uses more aperture, and as a result the background is blurred out, and even the close foreground tarmac is softer and not in focus.
The shot at the top uses extreme aperture to give an incredibly small depth of field.

Exposure

In real life, the only way to change exposure without changing any of the other settings is to change the ISO. In the days of film cameras, the ISO rating was given to the film and tells you how quickly the chemicals on it react to produce an image. Lower ISO numbers (i.e. 100) take longer to expose (so you’d need a longer shutter speed or more aperture) while higher ISO numbers (i.e. 2600+) expose quickly, allowing much shorter shutter speeds. The only downside to higher ISOs is that it increases noise (random pixels that aren’t exposed correctly). Forza doesn’t have this issue, as the exposure setting would appear to effect the lighting just like a longer shutter speed would in real life, without increasing the shutter speed. The game usually underexposes images as 60 is usually OK to use on some tracks, and around 55 on most others.

Some good comparisons of different exposure settings are these shots of an Audi RS3 and a Subaru Impreza. A few other settings were tweaked in the Audi RS3 shots, but the overall main change is the exposure.

Lower exposure:

Medium exposure:

High exposure:

As you can see, the exposure has a large effect on the mood of the photos, but all of them look good in their own way.

A good tip to get higher exposures without blowing out the shot is to find locations where the car is in shade - popular locations include parking under the bridge on the Benchmark high speed oval (and other bridges/tunnels), under pit building overhangs, on corners shaded by trees etc. Higher exposures are a lot easier to make natural and realistic looking, and if you include a bright area in the background you can often white-out the backdrop without burning out spots on the car.

“Burnt out” spots are areas of the photo where the exposure is so high the area becomes a white glow. They are often easy to spot, however small burnt out areas on chrome trim, windows and other highly reflective surfaces can sometimes go unnoticed and ruin a shot. If you’re using a high exposure or feel that the image is near the borderline of being overexposed it is almost always worth checking over the image quickly. To help, if you memorise the exposure setting you’re on, you can then move the slider up to over-expose the image and see where burnt out areas appear first. Then set it back down to what you originally had and check that those areas are fine. If they are, you’ll know that the rest of the image won’t be burnt out. Also there is a difference between a white area and a burnt out area - white highlights are often a great way to pick out detailing on your subject, however if the white area is glowing or looks too brightly white in the context, it is probably burnt out. When shooting into the sun, a burnt out look can make for a powerful effect if done correctly, so don’t shy away from them all the time.

Contrast

Contrast is often changed post-shoot, using editing software. Luckily FM4 allows you to change the contrast while composing the shot. I typically use a contrast around 52, although this varies greatly with most shots. High contrast can produce great artistic shots like this one of the Pike’s Peak Suzuki SX4:

Unlike most of the other settings, there is little point on using very low values for contrast. In the twenties and below the image usually will look horribly washed out and loose much definition - I rarely go down even to the high 30s. Going to the 40s works, especially when taking old-fashioned style photos as it mimics the results photographers got with the methods used years ago. Combined with sepia and getting the exposure right can produce great old looking shots. There are a few exceptions to this but they tend to be extreme artistic photos.

Colour

Colour is an important aspect of photography, and in Forza this is no different. The thing with colour is that it’s quite a balance, and will change with each shot depending on the mood. You don’t want to use too much colour or the shot will look oversaturated and unrealistic, but then again too little can leave it looking washed out and bland. The colour balance in FM4 is pretty well balanced, and usually to get the vibrancy you need you only need to go up to the 60’s or low 70’s on the slider. In some close ups, high contrast/vignette or artistic shots you may need to use high (even up to 100) colour, and in others you may need to use 0 (to get B&W). One trick you can achieve is turning the colour up too high, then increasing the Sepia bit by bit until the colours look almost normal, as this can add a warmth to the colours of the shot or make them less bright. This can be seen in the shot below of a Nissan 350Z:

In the above shot, the colours are too vibrant and distracting, whereas with higher colour and sepia, the colours become less dominating:

Brightness

Brightness is applied in-game in pretty much the same way as it is in real life using photo processing software (such as Photoshop) on a jpeg image, although a little more image data is retained in the FM4 photomode. As the setting name suggests, the brightness of the image is altered.

Increasing the brightness value can give a photo a washed out look, which is undesirable; whilst reducing it too much causes it to look too dark, and the white areas to turn a dirty grey colour. Often for realism in reasonably well-lit environments, values near to the default of 50 are best. Here is an example of a shot ruined by an overly high brightness:

And here is an image with much better brightness setting, resulting in a more aesthetically pleasing contrast:

Increasing the brightness is usually accompanied by an increase in contrast to counter the washed out look.

For old fashioned style photos, lowering the brightness until the image is slightly washed out can help add to the style, and is best combined with sepia, washed out colours and slightly lower aperture than usual, and possibly even a mild amount of the first or second vignette options (obviously though, this effect only works well with older cars or scenarios).

In low light situations such as in dark shadows, a higher brightness (70+) will sometimes work with a slightly higher exposure and a very high contrast.

Sepia

Black and white photos may fade with age, and you’ll probably have noticed that with the sepia setting at 100 the shot looks like an aged photograph. The effect of the sepia slider then is pretty obvious; with 0 colour the slider increases the saturation of the brown-ish hue of the black areas in the image, and with colour still left in, they become slightly muddy and the whiter areas become slightly cream-coloured. Sepia is best used when the photo you are taking is of an old fashioned scene in black and white, as it gives a good old-fashioned feel to the image. Also, low colour and low sepia can give the effect of an old, faded colour photograph which again works best with scenes depicting classic cars.

Modern cars can look great in sepia as well so don’t be afraid to try it, however naturally the old-fashioned feel will clash with the modern lines of the car.

Sepia can also be very useful for toning down colours that are too strong - see the Colour section (scroll up 2 sections) in this post for more information.

Vignette

There are three vignette styles in Forza 4, and each can be used to give dramatic styles to your photo. The first vignette style is very useful for retro/old-fashioned style photos, as it mimics the vignetting that often occurred with old camera equipment. The darkening of the corners is caused by the circular lens producing a circular image which isn’t large enough for the rectangular sensor or film to be completely exposed - this effect can be exaggerated when a lot of filters are applied in real life. Too much vignette in FM4 looks awful and cheesy the vast majority of the time, so I wouldn’t encourage you to go much higher than the 30s and not to add it unnecessarily.

The second vignette style - darkened sides of the image - can be useful for low-light shots to help remove distracting bright areas from the backdrop of your photo, however too much of it can also darken the edges of the car in subject, which gives the appearance of uneven lighting and isn’t desirable.

The third vignette option is perhaps the most interesting of the three, but also the most difficult to use well. Use too much, and you’ll be left with an overexposed line in the middle of the image and murky lighting on the rest of it. But in small amounts it can be perfect to compensate for an overexposed sky.

Vignette is particularly useful for black and white photography as the effects can often be much harder to see to the untrained eye. For example, this photo of the MINE’S R34 Skyline uses the third vignette style but has blended it into another line in the background so it isn’t as obvious:

And this shot of an Aston Martin DBS uses a fence in the background to disguise the vignette line:

Just like all the rules in photography, this one is made to be broken. If you plan your background and car’s position in relation to the light source, you can get photos like these:

Lastly, here are the default settings I use as a starting point for most of my photos:

  • Shutter speed: This will vary greatly for each individual photo
  • Focus: 100 (or 0 for high aperture shots)
  • Aperture: 63
  • Exposure: 60
  • Contrast: 52
  • Colour: 51
  • Brightness: 50
  • Sepia: 0
  • Vignette: 0
    Don’t use these for everything or treat them like they’ll guarantee good looking shots though - I don’t use them as they are for my photos, but use this as a starting point and make adjustments to each one accordingly. Also this doesn’t suit some locations or styles of photo, so again you’ll need to make your own judgements and change most (if not all) of them.
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General Tips And Tricks

Photoshoot In The Pits

If you’ve even used the pits in FM4 you’ll know that there is some good scenery and locations to take a photo - the trouble is you can’t park up in a nice pose for the camera. Well actually, you can! - Get into the car you want to shoot and enter a test drive.

  • Once the track has loaded, drive into the pit lane until the PITTING text appears.
  • Pause the game, go to tuning window and change something (you can change it back too if you want). Press B to leave, then A to apply the new tune setup.
  • When you un-pause the game you will be able to freely drive around in the pits, making your shot just as good as planned.

Slammed/Stanced Photos

If you want to get a photo of your car looking completely slammed (like the picture below), then follow these steps to get your shot:

  • Firstly, you’ll need to get your car tuned right. After fitting the required parts, set the ride height as low as possible and all the springs, dampers, roll bars etc as soft as possible, and add as much negative camber as you like.
  • Start a test drive or race and find a dip or jump in the track.
  • Build up some speed, drive over the jump and pause the game when the car has landed and bottomed out. To see when this is, do a practice jump in one of the chase cameras and look to the side as you land (using the right thumbstick to free look).
  • Enter photomode and snap away!

Wingless Look

If you want to get a photo of your ride without the rear wing but there is no option to remove it in the upgrades, there is often a way around this for photomode. A popular example is the Top Secret Nissan S15:

  • Get into your car, get into a race/test drive/hotlap/whatever, and park with the rear of your car facing a wall.
  • Reverse into it, turning slightly just before so that you hit the wall with one of the rear corners of your car, aiming to be going about 15-25mph.
  • If done correctly, your car will look like this from the rear, but be unmarked on the front and at least 1 side.
  • Take photos from the front of the front 3/4 view (or as far as you can go around the car without the damage being visible).
  • Restart if you damage too much. You’ll notice that the car damages in a few different ways depending on where you hit it and how hard, so experiment to get the damage on different parts. For example in the top photo of the TS S15 you can see the line of the boot is almost straight - to achieve this the car was angled more before hitting the wall so the rear panel took most of the force and damage.

Interior Shots

If you’ve ever wondered how people manage to get photos from inside a car’s interior or in such good detail, then there are a few ways of doing it:

  • In short, for the first method you apply loads and loads of different vinyl shapes to the car, then change into another car. Change back to the car you covered with shapes and quickly select the option to take a photo while you’re in the homespace. As soon as you’ve pressed A to select the Take Photo option, push the left thumbstick forward and hold it through the loading screen. If done correctly, the decals will have made the load time longer, so that the camera moves before the car is fully loaded. Therefore when it loads the car, the camera is inside the space where it spawns and you’ll be inside the interior. If you end up behind the car and facing away from it then you’ve put too many decals on and it’s taken so long to load, the camera has moved to behind the car before it spawns. I’d recommend you try about 200 layers on the top and another 20 on one side for good measure. They don’t have to be visible either - you can set them to 0 opacity or move them so they can’t be seen, and this trick still works.
  • The other method only works in a few locations (of which only a couple are well known). The most common is the first turn on Silverstone - park the car so that it’s facing in the direction of the straight with the concrete wall very close on the left. Leave a gap about the length of the bonnet between the car and the tire wall in front. Enter photomode, position the camera on top of the tire wall facing the car, and then hold down LT. Keeping it held, push the left thumbstick slightly forward so you crawl off of the tire wall, landing on the tarmac between it and your car. The next bit doesn’t always work and is very hard to do, but you have to keep the left trigger held down and crawl around, pushing the camera against the car or either wall. The aim is to force the camera through the concrete wall so that it goes outside the track boundary. From there you can move through the wall into the side of the car (this is why you need to be parked close to it) or go under the car and press RT to go up into it.
  • A less effective method is to crash until the window smashes (only happens on a few cars) and zoom in, but that’s not the same as being actually in the interior.

“Filters”

Filters are incredibly useful in the FM4 photomode as they can add interest to an otherwise bland shot, or even change the style or help offset uneven exposure. There is a crazily high number of items in Forza that can be used as a filter, ranging from cones to cars to fixed scenery, provided you know beforehand how you are going to use it.

Unlike real life, where a filter is added to a lens, most “filter” effects in Forza are achieved through the use of high shutter speed, aperture, or both. The idea is simple: find an object a fair distance from the car you’re shooting, move the camera so that the edge of it is around the middle of the screen, focus on the car and tweak the shutter speed and aperture settings until the object blurs across the screen, becoming almost transparent.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to try using other items and finding new ways to improve your shots. Below are some ideas for inspiration, with tips beneath them.


A pitlane toolbox is used to add a red tint to the shot.


A turquoise pitlane tent is used with some experimental settings to turn dark areas blue.


The above tent is used to give an x-ray effect.


The dust from the car in front is used to add a graduated filter.

Photography Tips

Wide Angle Shots

Using a wide viewing angle (set the zoom to less than 1x by zooming out) can offer whole new perspective to your shots. Low down photos of close up action can be made more dramatic in wide angle, as seen below:

The Rule Of Thirds

You’ll probably have come across the “rule of thirds” if you’re at all interested in photography. When composing your shot, imagine a grid over it dividing it into three rows and three columns, creating nine rectangles overall.

Take for example this shot of a Ferrari 430S. When cropped so that the car is in the centre, it looks worse than with it cropped to the rule of thirds.
Centred:

Obeying rule of thirds:

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Photo locations and specific tutorials

The main portion of this part of the thread is still in the works, but if you’ve seen a photo from FM4 and you’d like to know the location then post it here or in a PM to me and I’ll get back to you with where it is :slight_smile: These locations are just suggestions to get started - there are hundreds of locations that are great for static shots, and most of the track is good for motion shots.

Location 1

Track: Any of the Top Gear tracks
Good for: Realism & reflections
Example image:

Where is it?:
If you’re on one of the forward variants, turn around. Keep going past the final turn, and on the left there will be a concrete section. Turn into it and you will find this location. Park in roughly the area shown below for best reflections.

Location 2

Track: Any of the Mugello tracks
Good for: Very artistic or realism
Example image:

Where is it?:
Enter the pits on Mugello, it’s as simple as that. You can even leave it with the AI driving. When the car is fairly close to the beginning or end of the pit lane and travelling a decent speed, enter photomode and go around the pit wall on to the main straight of the track and shoot through the various objects around. Or to get realism, avoid foreground objects to get this:

Location 3

Track: Fujimi Kaido
Good for: Realism and dramatic lighting that’s great for reflections
Example image:

Where is it?:
On the full circuit, turn around at the start and keep driving until you drive over a bridge made of metal cross bars. Park under them and shoot away.

The background is very photogenic from almost any angle here as well, making it a great spot.

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Excellent instruction!

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If you are interested in photography, there is a glitch where you can control the car while in the pits, so you can take a pic next to a Le Mans garage or at the Nurburgring. This also is very interesting just to explore. The glitch is that you enter the pit lane and wait until the car takes control, then you go to tune setup and change anything you want (it can be changing the tyre psi from 30 to 30.5 if you don’t want to mess with anything). Make sure to apply the tune, and when you return in the pit lane, the yellow “pitting” sign will still be at the top of the screen, but you can now control the car. Works in hot laps, not sure if it does in quick races but it should. Hope you enjoy!

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Didn’t realize this same glitch was posted in the same forum! Sorry

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Just noticed that this thread has been stickied - thanks to the mod that did this :slight_smile: EDIT: Found out it was ManteoMax - thanks!

@GreenSquirrel70 - Thanks man, I appreciate it.

@UpcastMirror149 - No worries, thanks for posting! I’ll update my first post with a contents so that seeing what content is already posted will be easier :wink:

EDIT: More content added :slight_smile:

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Thanks for posting this QD ! I had never heard of the ‘Shooting in the Pits’ trick and some of the locations are new to me too.

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hi trehe…your topic add some new ideas to my head…thx a lot…maybe i will write some offtopic but have a question about location an deliting the photos…if i upload my pics to fm4net how can i delete them from my gallery in fm.net?

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Glad I’ve inspired someone :slight_smile: To delete photos from your FM.net, you need to delete them from your storefront, which is done by going from the main menu > Community > Storefront > My Storefront > Photos (use the shoulder buttons to scroll through tabs until you get to photos). Then select a photo by pressing A, and in the options that pop up there will be a delete photo option.

@Gdub - Thanks for the kind words :slight_smile:

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Great looking thread QD. I know you have been wanting to do this for a long time and it’s real helpful, I hope you don’t mind but I am sharing it on a facebook group.

Em

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Thanks Em, you can share it as much as you want :slight_smile:

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thx QUANTUM DRiFTER helping me a lot…

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Forgive me for asking kind of a basic question here.

At one time I had pulled my photos over to my computer. Then I had a crash and lost them all. Now that the forums have changed I looked under “gallery” and there was one photo there. I couldn’t figure out why there was only one picture there. But if I go into “media” on the console, all of my photos are still there. How do I get all of my pictures to show up under “gallery” here?

This time I want to get them pulled off and saved to thumb drive or something before I lose them again.

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To get a photo from your console to the gallery section it needs to be uploaded to your storefront. Any shot on your storefront that has no views after 30 days automatically gets deleted to free up server space, although it will still be on your console.

So to back them up you’ll need to go to Media > My Photos and then find a photo you want to upload. Hit A, select the option to upload to storefront, fill in any details you want to and press A again to upload. Do this with all the shots you want to backup, and they’ll all be in your gallery here on FM.net. There is a limit to the number of photos you can have on your storefront so if you run out of free slots to upload to then once you’ve downloaded everything on there to your pc, you’ll need to go back onto your Xbox and delete the photos from your storefront (be careful not to permanently delete them from your hard drive, to delete them from your storefront you’ll need to go from the main menu > Community > Storefront > My Storefront > Photos and delete them from here) and then upload more once you’ve freed up enough slots.

17

Ok thanks so much. I think I can do that. I couldn’t remember doing the storefront thing last time. Also it seems like I had to go and change something with their properties to pull them over to the computer last time. But the gallery option makes more sense and should be easier. When I saved the one picture that was currently in my gallery it wasn’t as big as it was in the gallery. Why is that?

18

How are you saving the photos? Are you right clicking them and saving them? If so it’ll only save the small-sized thumbnail of the photo - to get the full size you’ll need to click the image and then right click and save. The image url should end with “full=true” and not “full=false”. If it does end in false, change it to true and it’ll work. The url should then look like this (but with a different id number)

This is the full size image, the largest size available. It may be stretched slightly depending on your internet browser settings when you view it in the gallery, which could make it look larger.

If you want larger image sizes then you’ll need to take what is called a “Big Shot”, which increases the resolution (and thus size) of the image. The downside is that bigshots aren’t stored on your HDD or storefront, and only lasts in your gallery for a day or two (I can’t remember if it’s 24 or 48 hours).

19

Thanks for this, I picked up a few more tips I didnt know about. Its the small details that are easily overlooked. Example…I didnt know you could press X to put the object back in focus. Probably obvious, LOL. Great help, thank you.

20

It’s clearly not obvious enough; it took me a couple of months to find it out, and even then it was an accident :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the kind words too, I’ll be adding a new section on composition, framing, depth and perspective when I get enough time, as well as padding out the existing sections with more info.