Uploading beer pics on the beer profile page

Preferred. Glass of beer or tap handle?

  • Glass of beer
  • Tap handle

0 voters

I prefer the bottle/can over a tap handle, but at least the handle gives some idea of the packaging cachet. A glass of beer could be almost anything.

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100% prefer whatever is officially released high quality artwork, I only upload this when adding new beers, otherwise i’ll leave it. This is usually a pump clip or bottle/can artwork, if not then a high quality photo of the bottle/can/tap handle in real life is decent. A photo of the beer itself is pointless in my opinion.

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In past ive uploaded a picture of the bottle with beer in glass. It was alwats cropped by admin to just the bottle

Not completely. It can be used for identification purposes, color, for instance.

In case where there is a tap handle, then the tap handle is better, but the tap handles of, say, a brewpub in Franconia will just be generic tap handles with no information whatsoever about the beer or brewery. There, it is better to show the beer itself, possibly even served in a ceramic mug with brewery artwork on it.

The prime purpose of the photo on RateBeer is to aid identification rather than aesthetic appeal. So the bottle/can/pump clip is generally best for that purpose. In my experience tap handles (especially in the US) can be pretty generic and anonymous. Plus it can be difficult for the customer to actually see them close up, depending on where they are situated. I suppose, at a pinch, what the beer looks like could be helpful, especially if there’s nothing else in the way of point of sale branding.

There have been calls in the past for a gallery of multiple pictures for the same beer so that people could indulge their creative tendencies without detracting from the main purpose of the picture. That has never got off the ground. Personally I don’t particularly see the appeal of an Untappd style photo with every rating type thing - there’s only so many wonky pictures of a beer bottle in someone’s hand a man can take. At least, on Untappd, that alerts you to the fact that the wrong beer has been checked in - which is often.

I’ve sometimes thought it would be useful to have a picture of the front and back labels of bottles & cans but you can’t do that without some tedious photo editing & splicing. And the picture generally ends up too small and at too low a resolution to read the back label properly once it gets onto RateBeer anyway.

Of course, but those are exceptional cases to the point I was making. I agree in those cases a photo of the beer is better than nothing and useful for the purposes you said.

Yeah I wouldn’t bother going that far to be honest. Like you said, it’s for identification, I don’t think we need photo galleries. In an ideal world I suppose we’d have a picture of the label and a picture of the beer. I’m not convinced the back label is as useful, and as you said, it would be unreadable at the resolution RateBeer currently uses. Interestingly though, while the original resolution photo is discarded by RateBeer, a higher (or rather medium) resolution copy is stored, but is currently not used anywhere. For some reason only the thumbnail is displayed on a beer page.