In the new Story Maps, my images are blurry and unusable on mobile (but great on desktop)

[MartySchnure]

Hi there, 

I'm making a story map with the new platform and my images look great on desktop, but terribly fuzzy and totally unusable on mobile. I've made a dummy version of it here to illustrate the problem: bit.ly/FuzzyImageProblem and I've attached screenshots from my desktop and phone to show how differently they look on each.

I never had this issue with the old story maps, and I don't think I'm doing anything differently now. 

All my images are 2000px wide and 150dpi, as was previously advised to me by a Story Maps team member. I've tried using jpgs and pngs and there's no difference. There's also no difference when I export the images larger or smaller. 

Are others having this issue? Any help is much appreciated!

Please add any tags you feel will help me get an answer quickly. I'm on deadline to launch next week and I'd really like to use story maps for this project, but won't be able to if I can't resolve this. Thank you all!

Marty

ArcGIS StoryMaps‌ Esri Technical Support‌ Cooper Thomas‌

[OwenGeo]

Marty -- FYI, we pushed our update to Monday, so please wait until Tues to re-check the image quality.

[MartySchnure]

Thanks for letting me know, Owen. I look forward to seeing it on Tuesday.

Marty Schnure

Cartographic Designer

The Wilderness Society | The Wilderness Society Action Fund

Seattle, WA | cell: 508.642.9880

(she/her/hers)

[OwenGeo]

Marty -- Our update has been deployed. I'm seeing a noticeable improvement in the images in your story and other stories on phone and tablet screens. Please verify whether you can see this and let me know what you think.

Here's a screenshot of your test story from my iPhone.

[MartySchnure · Accepted solution]

Owen,

I’m seeing that too! Big improvement in quality, with no perceivable loss in load time.

Thank you so much for addressing this issue. My team and I really appreciate it.

Marty

[OwenGeo]

The images are larger, so they do take additional time to load, especially on slower connections. But, like you, we didn't see any significant slowdown in typical scenarios. We do have plans for further optimizations in the future, but we wanted to get this update out given the big improvement in quality, especially in images with text. Thanks again for your feedback on this.

[MartySchnure]

Our story is out and the images are nice and sharp. Thank you again for your quick action on this! My team and I really appreciate it.