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Not sure if it's only in Great Britain where this occurs, but the food manufacturers have taken the acronym WYSIWYG to heart.

Don't expect anything more than what is visible in the food packaging.

The little plastic window in the packaging shows lots of pepperoni?

Don't assume the whole pizza is uniformly covered in pepperoni.

You'll just make an ass out of yourself.

see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-5274153/Phot...

I've seen pix of sandwiches where the packaging looks like there's tons of filling only to reveal that all the fillings have been jammed to the front of the package window.

Is that actually intentional? i.e. if you bought a bunch of them would they all be like that?

It could just be that they have machines that try to randomly scatter pepperoni (or whatever) and then the ones where none of the pepperoni ends up visible fail QA. I think that's happening with at least the waitrose smoked salmon in that article, because I have had that before and it definitely wasn't misleading.

Some of it is completely intentional - some cakes and chocolates literally come with a vacuum-formed tray that takes up 80% of the volume of the package. And of course, many brands of crisps/chips come with enormous bags that are almost empty.

Of course, I'm sure the corporations would say it's "to stop the product getting damaged"

> Of course, I'm sure the corporations would say it's "to stop the product getting damaged"

It's marketing meant to grab the consumer's attention on a competitive shelf. If you look at the box of chocolates, for example, it's space meant to balance required flashiness (graphics + window to see chocolates) with their target price point. Companies do this all the time when selling tech gear that isn't measured in weight or volume. Small stuff like webcams will often have giant mostly empty boxes so they have room for graphics and copy. Shaving and perfume sets also do this all the time too.

Most recent example of empty bags I have encountered is salads/greens. The same bag size used to contain twice as much salad by volume just a year or two ago.

Yes, totally intentional. There are many clever tricks being played. 'michaelt mentioned trays taking most of the volume. I've also seen spacers added to the package to fill the area not visible through the little window, glass jars with very thick bottoms (covered by the label), and glass jars with double-layered bottom where the top layer is strongly convex - making the jar 10%+ smaller on the inside than it looks from the outside.

The toppings can slide around during shipping. If someone turns a box of pizzas on its side, the pepperoni slices will tend to slide to the low spot. When I make a frozen or take-and-bake pizza I almost always have to redistribute the toppings before I put it in the oven.

It's weird that they wind up in the transparent portion of the packaging so often, though.

> © REDDITT/IMGUR

ah, daily mail...

My favorite are the photoshopped images where the sizing is completely off.

This sewing machine's image[0] looks huge! When in reality, it's $20 and mostly a "toy" machine; not much bigger than 4AA batteries[1]. Or maybe the dude is just really small.

More hilarious than nefarious as in your case.

[0] https://my-test-11.slatic.net/original/8dcf4c63812b0453fc3ed...

[1] https://laz-img-sg.alicdn.com/p/3126136a068a0eca84086249126b...

That one actually seems straight up manipulated rather than just deceptively presented to me. That guy's entire arm is somehow fitting inside of a machine which could barely fit his finger in actuality!

Also the machine image is mirrored, controls are on the wrong side.

inflatable pool/yard toys are for some reason extremely susceptible to this. Like those paddling pools where the image shows a whole family playing in it, when in reality your kid can maybe fit a single ankle in there.

Yeah they are pretty straight-up about lying on the package. One I bought recently said "over 6 feet long!" But was more like 5'6" long.

Over 6' long if inflated to 100psi

Warning: risk of injury or death!

Reminds me of this classic scene from Top Secret: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJoTBlDfVhk :)

I have the plug in version of this sewing machine. Yup, it’s is pretty small in real life.

> make products look bigger than they really are, especially in online photos

I've noticed that tiny condos and apartments in real estate photos look enormous. I'm undecided on whether this is a deliberate attempt to mislead or an artifact of having to use a wide angle lens to capture the whole room (but an artifact that the seller and real estate agent like).

Real estate photos are so bad. When I sold my last house, I almost regretted it when I got the listing photos back. I never knew I lived in such a clean and enormous house!

Three things:

1. I get that interior shots need a wide angle to capture the boundaries of a room in a single photo. But there's a limit. Most pictures I see dial it up to those crazy levels where obviously square or circular items become rectangles and ovals. Here are 2 images I just now randomly picked:

This kitchen is long! https://i.imgur.com/YxrRMSy.jpg

Nope, just small: https://i.imgur.com/rPCSMUT.jpg

(But, the rise of 3D walkthroughs is a good antidote for this, so credit where it's due on that front.)

2. Saturation! Please, stop maxing out that slider. Sometimes it's just vivid blue sky and greenest green grass, but other times they go so far that the highlights are all blown out and everything just looks weird.

3. Fake fireplace fires, sunny weather, etc. A lot of photos have a fake sunny sky inserted into window openings, or a "fire" in the fireplace that's obviously been pasted in. Different random listing shows 2 photos with incredible luck—the flames are identical.

https://i.imgur.com/jhnwvAv.jpg and https://i.imgur.com/Ut1aTdl.jpg

My in-laws put their house on the market, and the Real Estate agent produced a walk-through video.

My wife and I couldn't stop laughing because the agent photoshopped a view into the kitchen window, but even in the context of the video it's clearly a plane with a texture on it just outside the window. It looks like a low-res poster of the Himalayas hung outside their kitchen window; it's not a convincing fake view in the slightest.

Don't know what the agent was thinking, the actual view out the window is better than that.

There’s actually a good reason for photoshopping in a fire in the fireplace. When doing real estate photography you generally want to do something to ensure that the windows aren’t overexposed and blown out. The two options are to light the interior with some flashes to balance the exposure (the better way), or use multiple exposures and do HDR.

If you use flashes, the fire will be too dark and won’t really show in the exposure. Moving flames will also screw up HDR.

I still think it’s stupid and only did it once at a realtor’s request.

The easiest trick is to blast a flash off white ceilings which then makes any other white walls look bright and clean

> Different random listing shows 2 photos with incredible luck—the flames are identical.

Ah yes, the old roaring fire directly below a window :)

I can confirm real estate agents in the Bay Area are notorious for the first one you listed. They can make a shoebox look like a palace.

I have been house shopping for about a year now (with no real urgency) and ALL real estate agents will do this. We saw a house where a real estate agent only used their cellphone for photos and the house had the lowest number of views. We went to see the house and it was a m a z i n g. You may joke about these photos, but people want to imagine the room. When you have spent some time looking at houses, your brain is able to convert from the wide angle deception to what it should probably look like.

It’s a bit of both. I’ve done some real estate photography, and realtors get stupid excited about ultra wide angle shots. Me? I tried to stay as tight as I could. I think it looks…classier? One other thing to keep in mind is that lenses aren’t especially cheap, and in this case you’d rather have too wide of a lens rather than something too tight, so people might go for the 16mm instead of the 20mm. If you’re doing it right (most don’t) you should be using a tilt-shift lens, and they’re usually $2,500+.

Anything is better than realtor cell phone pictures. I had a couple hire me independently because their realtor just quickly bopped around their house taking pictures on her phone…vertically. Yeah.

> One other thing to keep in mind is that lenses aren’t especially cheap, and in this case you’d rather have too wide of a lens rather than something too tight, so people might go for the 16mm instead of the 20mm.

If that's the issue then you can shoot the image with the 16mm and then crop to get exactly the same image (other than resolution) as you would have shot with the 20mm lens. For example, here[0] I have an image shot with a Samyang 14mm rectilinear lens, distortion-corrected and exported to JPG with UFraw. I then loaded that image into Hugin, set the input crop factor to 1 (full frame), and re-exported with a 84x61.9 degree field of view based on some online FOV tables[2] for a 20mm lens in a full-frame camera. As you can see, the resulting image[1] is what you would expect from a 20mm rectilinear lens. Hugin can also translate from a fisheye lens to rectilinear if that is the type of lens you happened to have on hand.

The trade-off is that you're losing some resolution, but you would usually be downscaling from the raw image anyway for the online listings.

[0] https://imgur.com/d0SumPb

[1] https://imgur.com/gbz6mys

[2] https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/fov-tables

Another one that's even worse than cell-phone pictures: Scans of pictures in newspaper listings!

Why are tilt shift lenses right for this?

You want to keep "verticals," as in walls, straight - but usually you'd rather show more of the floor than the ceiling. Being able to shift the lens up or down while keeping it level lets you do this.

You can just tilt the camera and fix the verticals in post, but then your composition will be thrown off as some of the image will need to be cropped.

You can capture more of the room without the fish eye distortion.

They are deliberate in that they know how to take a photograph which maximizes the attractiveness of a space.

The same tradition occurs in filling the written description of a place with no amenities. “Walking distance to schools & churches” is a popular filler. Τhe facility could be 50 feet away or it could be a 5 mile walk; anything short of walking alongside the freeway is fair game to describe in this fashion.

"Τhe facility could be 50 feet away or it could be a 5 mile walk"

Realtor associations at least in the Netherlands have guidelines (e.g. on what distances amounts to 'walkable') that prevent this sort of thing, I see no reaons our country would be unique; that said, do you have any specific examples of ads like this? It's not that I'm that fond of realtors, but some of the over the top claims in this thread are really exaggerations. Will you find examples of exaggerated claims? Of course. The question is, is it 'common'? I'd say no.

I would clarify that it is common in the US. Every state has an association but they are ‘lightly’ regulated at best. [Edit: except in the area of racial discrimination — the Federal government is keen to prevent realtors from racial profiling, and with good cause.]

My father worked as a realtor for some years so he taught me how to parse listings (and photographs) for the reality behind them.

Of course, in the Netherlands you'd just say "cyclable", and almost everything in almost every city is.

"Walking distance to schools" seems very at odd with the 'helicopter parent / pre-arrange play-dates / driving kids everywhere all the time' style of child rearing I see with many of my peers. The notion of being within walking distance to a school and actually have the kid walk... seems antiquated. I did it, in the 70s and 80s, but it seems to be a thing of the past in many areas.

Parents walk with their kids. It's still nice to walk and not have to drive.

>but it seems to be a thing of the past in many areas.

Varies greatly by income (which is why HN thinks it's extinct).

I happen to live within a few blocks of two elementary schools (one public, one private) in urban Seattle. Tons and tons of kids walk to and from school in groups without parents. Every day at 2:30 or whatever the streets around my house are filled with kids laughing and playing and doing kid stuff. Not a parent in sight.

Sometimes a narrative is just that.

Deliberate and a well known practice. Sometimes it's done poorly and leads to hilariously bad photos (e.g. a fridge as wide as a 72 inch TV).

Well, if everyone else is doing it, you're kind of forced to do the same.

Explain the companies that choose not to do it.

Who are you referring to?

Manipulated photos to make products look smaller or larger than they really are everywhere on eBay. You have to find the dimensions of the product to find out how big it really is. The use of small/large people and small/large hands is widely abused to affect perception of product size as well.

I bought some squid at an Asian grocer that was wrapped in a cellophane kind of plastic, with a little "window" showing you one full piece and the tips of two more pieces in other flavors. Imagine my surprise when I opened it and the the "tips" of the other pieces were the whole thing.

This happened a whole bunch to us recently. We even made a little display out of our online purchases gone wrong. Tiny hand creams, doll-sized post-it notes, itty-bitty padlocks, and more, all due to deceiving photos and prices. It became a joke whenever we ordered something new on Amazon to ask if it was going to be lilliputian or regular. It's clearly not an accident and has only been happening recently after 20 years of ordering regular sized things online.

Both photos clearly have the contents (in oz/gr) on them, and they appear perfectly standardized amounts. I don't think there's any conspiracy going on here. As to the conditioner, I quite like the trend of having multiple sizes of things (e.g. for travelling) and I'd hate the branding to be different depending on an implementation detail like the amount of product I'm buying.

I mean, you can see conspiracies everywhere if you look for them, but the examples you're showing don't convince me in the least.

Yes, I knew someone would say this. But in the context of putting together a 60 item grocery order in 30 minutes, it’s easy to miss some data points. I would imagine a large number of people would be occasionally misled by things like this unless they’re paying close attention.

Every scam in the world can be avoided if the customer pays enough attention. One can always say - pay more attention and you won't get scammed. This doesn't make the practice any less scummy.

But the question is - is there any indication of intent to mislead. They just don't pay much attention to how things look when photographed for online shopping, it seems to me.

This is one of the situations that should be approached with Hanlon's handgun, not Hanlon's razor.

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by systemic incentives promoting malice."

C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691282

Of course they say the amounts—I believe that's regulated by the FDA for such products.

That does not in any way mean they aren't deliberately making their smaller products look larger by proportionally shrinking down the font sizes.

Yep, came here to say this. We buy looking at the grams, not the jar or tube.

Manufacturers actually pay for the volume of space used in stores. The more efficiently they use the space, the better. Having smaller jars or tubes for the same grams is a good thing!

The other trick you see often is increasing the size of the concavity on the bottom of the package. Two items can look identical on the shelf but have dramatically different volumes.

People also noticed slight changes in food content, playing on volume scale iirc. Box looks only slightly thinner, content quite less, price a little below. Naively you think you bought the same at a discount.

This is among the many reasons why I shifted to purchasing as much as I can from zero-waste groceries, bulk ingredients buying using my own containers, and preparing meals from scratch. Packaged products' value proposition used to be predicated primarily upon convenience. If I find myself having to spend time and cognitive load to evaluate and vet a type/brand of packaged product due to obfuscations and distortions, then I immediately stop buying from them altogether, find DIY options and bulk prepare them, or do without.

> It's not necessarily a new thing, but the online photo aspect is somewhat novel because you don't get to see the product in context. For example, a jar of Jalapenos

Nutella has been doing that for decades.

Another similar problem is hot sauce sizing, and whether "X oz (2 pack)" means two bottles of X or two bottles of X/2 for a total of X oz.

Btw, with those jalapenos... not only is the jar misleading, but I found those jalapenos to be mushy and bland. I found this brand afterwards that was much better: https://www.mezzetta.com/products/deli-sliced-hot-jalapea-o-...

Buy nice looking jalapeños at your grocery store; slice them into a glass or plastic container; fill half-way with white vinegar; add salt; fill the rest of the way with water. Put them in the fridge.

They'll be ready to eat the next day and last a couple of weeks.

I like adding garlic and dill.

In cases where online sales outpace in-store sales, the labeling is more designed for the online product photo than for reality.

My Aldis and Homeland frozen blueberries have gone from 12oz to 10oz. Walmart is still 12.

This is EXACTLY what I noticed when strolling the aisles of 5 Below for the first time.

I can't even really tell for the shampoo except for the listed ounces.

The Big Mac in the ad never looks like the real life one.

In theory if you bought hundreds of them you could piece one together that looked like the ad. They are real food, but they are the best of the best for the photo op.