How to upload your custom images

This guide will show you how to upload your own images to billboards in your zoo!

How can you get your images in-game

If you want your custom images to show up in-game, you have to save them in This PC/Documents/Frontier Developments/Planet Zoo/UserMedia.
After you dropped them in that folder, you will be able to access them through your billboards, screen panels, education boards and others, under the "REPLACE IMAGE" button, through which you will access Custom Media, where your pictures are saved. Then you just choose and confirm the image you wish to display in your zoo and there you go, now you can customize your zoo with pretty pictures as much as you like.

Which images should be uploaded

As you may already know, billboards in Planet Zoo come in many sizes, from small TVs you can put on your vending shops, to enormous screens that can cover entire habitas. So in order for you to choose the best image to use in your zoo, here are the various sizes of custom billboards:

- Screen Panel - 1:1, Square, 512 x 512px
- Conservation Education Board - 9:16, Tall, 256 x 456px
- Projection Screens (8m, 16m, 32m) - 16:9, Wide-Large, 1824 x 1024px
- TV Screen (4m), Projection Screen (4) - 16:9, Wide-Medium, 912 x 512px
- TV Screens (1m, 2m), Habitat & Exhibit Screens - 16:9, Wide-Small, 456 x 256px

Of course you can upload bigger images to smaller billboards, the quality of them won’t degrade, but if you wish for your displayed pictures to look good, you should follow the minimum size requirements of each screen/board.

Why you should edit your images

Aside from obvious use of square images for square boards and rectangle images for rectangle boards, you should always edit your pictures before droping them in your Planet Zoo folder!
You may ask yourself: "But why, George?", and the reason is this problem that occurs when you set your custom image on a billboard: your image will be BRIGHT AS THE SUN.
Most billboards in Planet Zoo are computer screens, which means that they are lit, but the same thing somehow happens on non-lit boards too. So when you display your beautiful picture, you may not even see it during the day hours, or not even during the night hours in your zoo, depends on how bright the original, that you chose, is. I will show you how it looks on this example:
This is the picture that I want to use in my game...









And this is how it will look in game, if I don’t edit it.









Looks pretty bad if you ask me, and the brighter your original image is, the worse it will look in-game. Just look at this example of poor George shining like a lamp:

How should you edit an image

For this part of the guide I am going to use Photoshop for editing, but if you don’t have Photoshop or if you don’t have the means to get it on a 100% discount, you can still use the free alternative called Gimp, that does the job just as good.

Now you need to open your image in Photoshop, then click Image on the top, select Adjustments and then Brightness/Constrast.
After you do that, you should considerably alter the sliders on both Brightness and Contrast. Make your image much, much darker, and increase the Contrast quite a bit.


You may be thinking that the image is now too dark and has too much contrast, but trust me, it will look better once you put it on a billboard in your zoo. At this point you can play with levels, hue, filters and whatnot, but for the purpose of this guide we will not change anything else and proceed to export the image to your UserMedia folder.

As you can see on the screenshot below, the picture on the right side, which we edited just now, looks much better than the unedited picture on the left.

Important note: the Brightness/Contrast slider in Gimp can be found under Colors, and not under Image as in Photoshop.

Ending notes

Now you know how to upload custom images to Planet Zoo. You are now able to make your zoos more interesting and prettier than before and of course more personal. Here are some examples on how to use your own custom boards:





Anyway, let your imagination run wild, which is the point of Planet Zoo, and I hope this guide helped you in some way.
Thank you for reading and take care!

Also, if you want to upload gifs and music, but don't know how, I made another guide just for that
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3359590475

[itsmebobo]

TYSMM

[MitziAmelia]

Hmm.... I'll try this.

[Trade_gaming]

thank you