A couple’s gallery opens on a full-screen image: either a photograph you uploaded or a frame from the featured film. It is the first thing anybody sees, and because it fills whatever screen it lands on, it gets cropped differently on a phone than on a desktop. You can decide which part survives.
The two sources
Open a wedding and use the Cover button. There is no third option and no default beyond the film — a gallery with neither shows the studio’s own atmosphere rather than a broken image.
Upload an image. This is the one to use when a particular photograph is the wedding — the portrait, the venue at dusk. It is compressed and resized on the way up, so a 12MB export from Lightroom is fine to hand over as it is.
Use a film frame. Knotflix takes the poster frame from the featured film, so the backdrop and the film agree without you exporting anything.
Whatever you choose also becomes the wedding’s card in your dashboard and in the Mac app, so the image is doing four jobs rather than one.
The focus point
An image that fills the screen has to be cropped, and the crop is different on every device. A photograph that is perfect on your laptop can put a couple’s heads above the top edge on a phone held upright. Knotflix crops from the centre until you say otherwise.
On a wedding with an uploaded cover, the Cover menu offers Set focus point. Click the part of the photograph that must survive — usually a face — and four previews show the real shapes that image gets used at: phone, tablet, desktop, and the wide hero at the top of the Mac app.
Judge the previews together rather than one at a time. A point that saves the phone can ruin the desktop, and the previews are there so that trade is visible while you are making it.
It applies everywhere that cover is cropped — the couple’s backdrop, the wedding’s card, and the Mac app’s header — from the one decision.
Back to centre undoes it. Centre is what every gallery does until somebody chooses otherwise, and nothing changed for the galleries you have already delivered.
A film-frame backdrop has no focus point. The frame is taken at playback size and is not cropped the same way, so the option is not offered — that is deliberate rather than missing.
Choosing an image that survives a crop
The focus point does a lot, but the photograph has to give it something to work with.
Landscape beats portrait. A tall photograph loses its edges on a wide screen no matter where the focal point sits.
Leave room around the subject. A tightly cropped frame has nothing to spare, so every device shows very nearly the same thing and the point stops mattering.
Expect the middle to survive and the edges not to. Anything that only works because of what is at the corner of the frame will not survive the phone.
Look at it on a phone once. It takes ten seconds on your own gallery link and it is the shape most couples open first.
Common questions
Where do I set the focus point?
Open the wedding, use the Cover menu, and choose Set focus point. It appears only on a wedding with an uploaded cover image, because a film-frame backdrop is not cropped in the way a focus point would change.
Will setting one change galleries I have already delivered?
Only the wedding you set it on, and only how its image is framed. Nothing about the films, the photographs, the link or the password changes.
What happens if I never set one?
The image is cropped from the centre, which is what every Knotflix gallery has always done. There is nothing to fix unless a particular photograph is being cropped badly.
Does this change the image quality?
No. It changes which part of the same image you see when it has to be cropped. The file uploaded is the file served.
Can I set a focus point on a collection cover or my portfolio header?
Not yet — today it is the wedding’s own cover image, which is the one used as the full-screen backdrop and therefore the one cropped hardest.
Set one on a wedding
Knotflix is run by a working studio — reply to any Knotflix email and a filmmaker answers.