Prepping photos before you upload them
It's easy to forget that a tier board is made of tiny tiles, not full-size pictures. A screenshot with a lot of empty space around the subject, or a tall portrait photo, gets center-cropped down to a small square — and whatever mattered near the edges can disappear. Before uploading a batch of item photos (say, screenshots of characters, product photos, or team logos), it's worth a quick pass: crop each one loosely to square, with the main subject roughly centered, so the automatic crop doesn't cut anything important off.
Hypothetical example: imagine ranking a dozen sneaker photos pulled from different online listings — some wide, some tall, some with the shoe off to one side. If you crop each to a centered square in your phone's photo editor first, the tier board ends up visually consistent, instead of some tiles showing a full shoe and others showing just a laces close-up.
You can upload multiple images at once, or paste a single image straight from your clipboard with Ctrl+V — both land in the pool as ready-to-drag tiles, no separate resizing step required by the tool itself.
Keeping labels and text readable at a glance
Text items wrap onto two lines inside their tile before getting cut off, so a short label ("Oreo," "Messi," "S3E9") stays crisp while a long sentence turns into a blur nobody will read on a phone screen. If you're ranking something with long official names, consider shortening them in the item text and saving the detail for a caption elsewhere — the row is a ranking chart, not a full writeup.
One thing the tool doesn't do yet is let you annotate directly on top of an uploaded photo — no built-in cropping, no drawing a circle around a detail, no dropping an emoji sticker onto the image itself. If you want that kind of annotated look (an arrow pointing at something, a small caption baked into the photo), the current workaround is to edit the image in a separate photo app first, or place a short text item right next to the picture in the same row. A lightweight built-in option for cropping and adding a simple text or emoji overlay to an uploaded thumbnail would be a natural feature to add later, but for now it's a two-step process if you want that effect.
| Step | Why it helps |
|---|---|
| Crop close to square, subject centered | Matches how the tile displays; avoids surprise cropping |
| Keep file sizes reasonable | Faster to add a big batch, faster to export the final PNG |
| Use short text labels alongside images | Avoids two-line wraps that shrink the visible photo |
| Group similar photo styles per row | Keeps the finished board visually consistent |
Picking the right export format for where you're posting
PNG is the right call for a tier board specifically because rows, labels, and thumbnail edges stay crisp — there's no blur or color banding around your text the way a heavily compressed JPEG can introduce. For posting to a Discord channel, a subreddit, or a group chat, that watermark-free PNG downloads and drops straight in.
Where format choice starts to matter more is with photo-heavy boards being uploaded somewhere that caps file size tightly, or a platform whose upload widget prefers a specific aspect ratio for previews. In those situations a JPEG (smaller file) or a pre-sized "social" export tuned to a common feed ratio can save a step of re-compressing the image yourself afterward. That's not something the tool does today — it's PNG only — but it's a reasonable option to keep in mind as a future addition alongside the current download button, especially for anyone exporting a lot of image-heavy boards regularly.
In the meantime, if you do need a smaller file, most phones and basic photo apps can re-save a PNG as a compressed JPEG in a couple of taps after downloading — a fine stopgap until a built-in option exists.