Problems with JPG files in Storyline 360

Apr 17, 2018

Mark Simon
By Mark Simon

I uncovered a few bugs with JPG files in Articulate 360 and thought it might be helpful to offer at least one (very easy) potential workaround.  Problems include:

  • Images being inserted upside down or sideways
  • Image cropping behaving very badly/not working
  • Storyline crashing when re-sizing an image

In the situation with cropping, when I grabbed to the top middle crop handle and dragged down, Storyline cropped the right and bottom of my image.  In the re-sizing situation, I grabbed the left middle handle of an image and tried to enlarge the width.  (May be worth noting that the image was set to maintain aspect ratio, which could have been a contributing factor.)  All of the above issues were repeatable, even when re-starting my workstation.

Here's the good news:  The workaround is very simple:  Open the JPG in MS Paint (or your favorite raster-based graphics tool) and save the image as PNG.  Done!  I've found none of those issues (and better graphic handling overall) when using PNG files.

I'm not suggesting that the Articulate engineering team let these bugs go -- and it's really a shame if the Articulate QA folks missed these issues -- but the workaround does seem to work very well for now.  Hope this helps!

 

Pinned Reply
Luciana Piazza
21 days ago04/30/24 at 1:23 pm (UTC)

Hello Everyone! 

I'm happy to share that we have released a new update for Storyline 360 (Build 3.87.32265.0).

In this update, we have implemented a fix for:

  • Erratic movement made cropping a rotated image difficult.

As a first step, I recommend updating Storyline 360 to the latest version. Here's how:

Update Authoring Apps

If you have any questions on Update 87, please let us know in this thread or privately in a support case.

Have a great day! 

7 Replies
Crystal Horn
6 years ago04/18/18 at 4:44 pm (UTC)

Hi Mark!  Thanks for sharing the solution you found - that's what makes this community great.  ☺️

We are investigating some behaviors:

  • Crashing:  Were you working with the color aspects of the image (contrast, recolor) as well as cropping?  We were having a look at an issue where Storyline performance suffered when manipulating the cropping and coloration tools.
  • Bad cropping:  Were any of the images manually rotated in Storyline?  We found an issue where cropping a rotated image was difficult because the image moved during the process.

As for your upside-down photos, I have anecdotally experienced something similar when using photos taken on a phone that had been rotated.  Those photos are actually rotated, but tagged with an orientation instruction that not every application can read.  Read more about that here.

Does that sound like it matches your experience?  I'll confirm whether Storyline should be able to understand the intended rotation of those .jpg files.  It sounds like when you convert them in MS Paint e.g., the intended rotation is properly saved and then they display properly in Storyline.

Mark Simon
over 5 years ago02/10/19 at 2:13 pm (UTC)

Hi Crystal,

I'm *SO SORRY* that I missed your response to my posting.  Not sure if I missed an email or of I just should have kept an eye on my posting.  Either way, my fault....  :-/

In response to your questions, I was not doing any coloration to the images but occasionally I would crop and, to fix the upside-down images, I would rotate them.  However, I was only cropping ~10% of the photos and the odd behavior was happening with just about all of the images.

However, you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned photos taken on a phone because just about all of these images were from the phones of my subject matter experts.  Perhaps the issue is not just JPG format, but JPG format that comes from mobile phones.

It's possible that there's nothing Articulate can do to control/fix that issue, but I know that my Windows photo viewers all display the photos properly, as does PowerPoint and all the other MS Office apps, so I hope that something could be done to make the situation a little better.

Thanks much for your attention to this matter -- and sorry once again for the long delay with my reply.

Crystal Horn
over 5 years ago02/11/19 at 4:38 pm (UTC)

Hi there, Mark!  No worries about the delay in response time.  We're always here to help!

To give you an update, the issue with Storyline when rotated images are formatted using the color tools was fixed in update 17 last June.  The issue with cropping rotated images is still open with our team.

Photos that have been taken with a phone and have an originally rotated orientation will still show as rotated in Storyline because Storyline isn't able to read the orientation tag.  Currently, it's a feature request to change that behavior.

Let me know if you have other questions!  

Mark Simon
over 2 years ago11/03/21 at 12:04 pm (UTC)

Hi Teresa - Sounds like the problem may not be completely fixed, but I did a few quick tests and couldn't duplicate the problem so my guess is that the underlying problem may be the device that took the photo -- and then perhaps Storyline as well.  I did my testing with a few portrait photos taken on iPhones, but I had Android phones for a long time so perhaps the Android images were problematic for Storyline??

Have you tried to insert the photo into another software application - like PowerPoint, for example?  If the image inserts correctly in PowerPoint, then I would try right-clicking on it, saving it as a PNG, and then try inserting that image into Storyline.  Hope this helps....

Luciana Piazza
21 days ago04/30/24 at 1:23 pm (UTC)

Hello Everyone! 

I'm happy to share that we have released a new update for Storyline 360 (Build 3.87.32265.0).

In this update, we have implemented a fix for:

  • Erratic movement made cropping a rotated image difficult.

As a first step, I recommend updating Storyline 360 to the latest version. Here's how:

Update Authoring Apps

If you have any questions on Update 87, please let us know in this thread or privately in a support case.

Have a great day! 

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