Ship cards now show the moment someone caught them
Earlier today the vessels section of the directory stopped painting black squares and started drawing a silhouette when a ship has no photo. That fixed the broken look, but it left most of the page as silhouettes. Of the 1,702 ships players have caught, only 315 have a photo on Wikimedia Commons. Freighters, tugs and ferries rarely get one.
We already had a picture for almost all of the rest. Every time you catch a ship in flight, Skydex keeps a screenshot of that moment as proof. 1,593 ships have one. The ship's own page has shown them for a while, in the wall of catches under the hull. The directory did not use them.
Why it took more than one line
A proof screenshot is your whole browser window at the moment you pressed the shutter: 1,910 pixels wide on a laptop, about 200 KB. A directory page shows 120 cards. Drawing 120 full screen grabs means roughly 25 MB of download and several hundred megabytes of memory once the browser decodes them. That is the same kind of load that made Safari on iPhone close the directory tab last week, so we were not going to point cards at the originals.
The server now makes a card-sized copy instead. It reads the screenshot, scales it to the width the card draws (250, 500 or 960 pixels), keeps the whole frame without cropping, and stores the copy so the work happens once. The grab from the example above went from 206 KB to 12 KB.
Credit goes to the catcher
When a ship card falls back to a catch screenshot, the corner credit reads the player's name and links to their profile, the same way a Wikimedia photo names its photographer. If the ship has a Commons photo, that still comes first.
Other places got lighter too
Your collection, your profile, and the ship walls on flag and shipyard pages were already using catch screenshots, at full size. They now load the small copies as well, so a long collection on a phone scrolls without the browser running out of memory.
Aircraft were in better shape already: 920 of 943 caught airframes have a photo, and since this afternoon a type with no Wikimedia picture borrows one from a caught airframe of that type.
See also: Directory cards: no more black squares.