✅ Something's off with the flag images

So it’s not only me who saw the strange colors of the flags this morning when I went to the website. I thought something had happened to my eyesight :sweat_smile: Obviously something happened to the flags.

Macau flag is almost unrecognizable

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Antarctica has a flag now on the site, though! :slight_smile:

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I noticed that too, especially the USA flag which looks like it has part of the Uruguay flag stuck to the bottom edge of it. It is interesting, because Uruguay is right after United States in alphabetical order.

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In fact that looks to be true for other flags in your screenshot too: for example, the black stripe at the bottom of the Japanese flag there is from the top of the Jordanian flag.

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It’s good to know that you guys spotted it as well - initially I thought that maybe my laptop needs to be replaced after 6 years… :sweat_smile:

I hope that it will be fixed soon! :slight_smile:

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I now have a whole new view of the flags. Not only did they have a different color tone, they also got completely different colors or different pictures. There are some completely different symbols, that don’t belong in the flag!


Bildschirm­foto 2023-01-14 um 15.25.38
Bildschirm­foto 2023-01-14 um 15.25.44
Bildschirm­foto 2023-01-14 um 15.26.00

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I remember that for the team it is good to state through which browser you enter the site.

On both my iphone and Mac Safari all looks as usual:

image

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Love that Finland flag :grin::heart:

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I noticed that yesterday and was wondering what it was! Great eye!

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I’m wondering what our governments will think about the new flags :rofl: :rofl:

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But really, I’m deeply wondering if this is a conscious permanent change or some technical problems? @paulo I’m very curious. It is quite irritating to the eyes. (I’m using Chrome)

Sorry for only looking into this now, but it’s been pretty packed days.

Indeed, we have replaced the existing flags with ones from a different source to fix long standing issues with missing flags and some outdated ones (although this set is likely to have some outdated ones too as there are regular changes). The new set also comes with large versions of them which we plan to use later in country pages.

Some of the issues reported are a bit unexpected though.

Extra line from a different flag
This shouldn’t be happening and I’m not quite sure what’s triggering that for only some of you. I have however made some changes today that should help with this. Those that were seeing that extra line at the bottom, can you check now?

Complete wrong/mixed flag

Uh… what? :flushed: My best guess is that some cache issue was messing up things. Those that experienced this, can you check now after the changes I did today? If you still see that, can you try hard refreshing the browser and/or clearing the browser cache/temporary files?

If that still fails to fix it, then please let me know the exact device (including model) you are using as I’ll need to know the screen resolution and pixel density of it to try to make sense of what may be causing it.

Inaccurate colors
That caught us by surprise as we were aiming to improve the flags with a more accurate set which seemed to use the exact color codes used by each flag. We did a side by side comparison but missed this.

It will be tricky for us to fix these issues if the provider of the flags doesn’t fix it too. I will come back to this one once get the 2 points above cleared up.

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Hi @paulo,

this is the new look of my flags now:

They look okay in style. Are the colors correct? I have no comparison or do they seem stronger than usual? :thinking:

I emptied my caches, but I don’t think that’s the reason. :+1:
Sometimes I use my Samsung cell phone and sometimes a MacBook or iPad, it’s the same view on all of them.

However, I think the colors are now okay as they are (for me). What I found worse, was the totally weird display of different flags mixed together. :face_with_spiral_eyes:

Thank you for your commitment and constant help here in the forum. It is not a matter of course, that you constantly take care of everything so quickly and be there for the forum members. this also applies to all @moderators :wink:.

Thank you very much! :+1::pray:

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The extra bottom line is gone for me too. And I noticed the :uzbekistan: flag is now no longer black. I had to google it, I was so used to the old image I didn’t realize it wasn’t correct :slight_smile:

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As I had screenshots from before, I put them side by side for comparison. This is best seen on the flags of the USA and Belarus, they are completely illegible and the colors are “heavy”. On the right you can see how clear and eye-friendly the flag was. Now the worst is with shades of green and different kind of blue, for example Macau as I added before. Sometimes now it’s hard for me to recognize which country it is. On the occasion it just caught on how weird Switzerland looks now

This is not really a suggestion, but I noticed that some flags which appear on Postcrossing are actually old flags. It is the case for instance for Mauritania and Martinique.


This is the new flag of Martinique (the former one was more beautiful in my humble opinion by the way :blush:):

And this is the flag of Mauritania:
:mauritania:
I don’t know if it is possible to change these flags @meiadeleite (it may not be the most urgent thing, but this will make Postcrossing an even more perfect site :smile:)

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Those look better now. Still not quite sure what caused the garbled flags, but glad it’s fixed.

Regarding colors, they may feel “heavy”, but, I think, they are actually more accurate now, as the author of the new ones used the official (where available) color codes for each one (n.b., Russia’s colors are wrong because an older flag was used — hopefully it will be fixed). There may be some slightly inaccurate tones from the scaling down an image to so few pixels, but otherwise, on average, the new colors should be more accurate that before.

A few flags had been incorrect for several years and some were missing. The new set of flags addresses most of those issues.

The designer of the previous set hasn’t update them for over a decade, so we had to move to something different as we don’t have the skills to be adding/editing flags ourselves.

That is true and I’m not sure what’s causing this as Nepal’s flag seems correct even though its shape is even less common than Switzerland’s squared one. Will report in case the author wants to address this.

As with most changes, I won’t be able to make everyone happy at the same time and this is something we might not be able to help with.

The trouble comes from trying to squeeze detailed elements into so few pixels and also from how they were designed. While the older set was designed to be displayed at that (and only that) tiny size, the new set is described in much more detail so that it can be displayed in large size, and then the small versions are created by scaling down from the large ones — inevitably, some detail is lost on the downscaling.

An example to explain this. Take the US flag highlighted on the right here

I completely agree it looks more detailed. But It’s also wrong: the USA flag has 13 horizontal red-and-white stripes, while the previous set illustrated it as having 11 red-and-white stripes. Also, the blue part of the flag should be just 40% of the width and about half of the height, but the older version was showing with over half of the width and more than half of the height. Lastly, all flags on the older set had a styled border of sorts around them to make them look glossy, but the border doesn’t actually belong to the flag. The new ones don’t have a border which is more accurate with the actual flags (just as they are here on the forum).

But, again, I reckon the new ones are not perfect: some parts are now less detailed and there’s no denying about it. If you happen to have a high resolution screen (retina displays, some smartphones), you may actually be able to seeing them in more detail now, as we are using a bigger image, but otherwise, for detailed elements, it will now look more fuzzy in some places.

With all this said, there’s still some improvements that are coming that will partially address some of this issues. One (partial) solution for the above is to make the flags bigger: more pixels = more detailed. But, right now, most of the website uses a font size that would make the flag too tall next to the text. However, we have (separate) plans to update the font size throughout the website to help with legibility, and that will give room for the flag to have some extra pixels in height which will allow more detail to be used. I don’t have any date for these updates, but it’s coming.

For now, I would appreciate reports on any outdated/wrong flags so that I try can report them to the author of the new set. For now, I’m aware of

– Martinique (outdated, since 4 days ago!)
– Mauritania (outdated)
– Colors of Russia’s flag

Mind that we have no guarantee that these will addressed by the author of the flags, but having the issues reported will be a step in the right direction.

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For me it’s looking a little better now, the flags no longer have the next flag in alphabetical order attached to their bottom. Instead the top parts of some flags are cut off, with extra white space at the bottom now. Some of the colours seem a little off still too, mainly with Russia’s blue being too light. But overall I think it is an improvement from before!

That’s interesting! Feels like the flag is a little bit off in position and before still had another flag behind it and now just the background. As Paulo indicated he had no clue where this problem comes from, could you please provide below information?

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By the way…

I noticed something else: Since the flags were changed, my correct first name is displayed!!! :metal: :+1:

I am spelled “Karina” with K in German. Since I’ve been on PC, you could read “About Carina…” with C displayed from system in my profile.
Since the update I can see my real name!! Yayyy!!! :smiley:

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