Real ship photos on your collection cards
When you catch a notable ship — a cruise liner, a famous container vessel — we quietly look her up on Wikidata by IMO number. That lookup already gave the vessel's own page its shipbuilder credit and, for many hulls, a real photograph from Wikimedia Commons. But the photo stopped there: open your collection and the same ship you just admired in full photographic glory was back to being an emoji on a gradient. The shipyard pages were worse — a yard's proud legacy rendered as a plain text list.
That gap is closed today.
Photos follow the card now
The Commons photo is now snapshotted onto the card itself, the same way the builder credit is. Everywhere a card renders small — the dex wall, the collection teaser on your profile, a shipyard's vessel wall — the card art picks the best available image in this order: your own verified real-life photo first (nothing beats a picture you took at the pier), then the Wikidata photo of the hull, then your sim proof screenshot. Ships with none of the three keep the emoji scene — an honest reminder that the card is waiting for better art.
Shipyard pages became card walls
A shipyard page used to list its spotted vessels as rows of text. But a yard's page is really a shelf of collectibles — every hull built there that any pilot has caught. So the list is now the exact same holo-card wall your dex uses: rarity frame, category colour, flag, length, spotter count, and the hull's photo when Wikidata knows it. Tap any card to open the vessel's page.
Your existing cards heal themselves
Cards claimed before today didn't store the photo. Two paths fix them without you doing anything: every new claim snapshots the photo immediately, and simply opening a vessel's page heals every card of that ship — ours included the fields the moment the page loads its Wikidata data. We also run a one-shot server pass that walks every carded IMO and fills in what Wikidata knows, so collections built over the past weeks light up at once rather than ship by ship.
Coverage stays what it is: Wikidata knows the notable fraction of the world fleet, skewed to famous ships. That's fine — it means a photographed card stays a bit of a find, the same way a known shipyard is. The rest of the fleet is yours to document with the 📷 real-photo flow.