How To Make A Picture Box Quiz

(Last Updated On: August 12, 2021)

If you’re familiar with Sporcle, it’s likely that at one time or another you have come across a picture box quiz. There are certainly some great ones on the site. However, for a long time picture box quizzes could only be made by a small group of individuals on the site (namely, Admin, Editors, and Curators). Well, that is no longer the case. Now, ANYONE with a Sporcle account can make a picture box quiz!

Can’t wait to get started making a picture box quiz of your own? Before you do, here are a few handy tips to help you get started.

Movie Posters Picture Box Quiz

Getting Started – The Basics

First things first – navigate to the Quiz Management Dashboard and click the orange ‘Create a Sporcle Quiz’ button. Then enter some basic information about the quiz you’re making.

Quiz Name:
Start by typing in the name of your quiz. (Don’t worry, you can change this later if you want.)

Similar Quizzes:
If your quiz has already been made by another user, it will display in the ‘Similar Quizzes’ box below.

Quiz Type:
For ‘Quiz Type,’ choose ‘Picture Box’.

After selecting your quiz type, click the ‘Create Quiz’ button.

Once Your Draft Is Created

1. Creating an Image

Now that you’ve created the quiz, you’ll start off in the ‘Game Info’ tab. One of the first things that you will notice is a ‘Game Image URL’ section. As with other quiz types like Map or Picture Click, in this section, you will need to paste the URL for the image you’d like to use. 

Creating images for picture box quizzes is an extremely important step, and can be a bit hard for users who are not used to image editing. As with anything, creating picture box images will take some practice, and perhaps even a little trial and error.

When you play a picture box quiz, you’ll typically see all images arranged nicely in a grid format. Many users assume then that the image you upload should also be created in that style. This is incorrect, however. When you are making your image, you’ll actually be placing each individual image on below the next, until you have a stack or column of all the images in the quiz. See the image to the right for an example.

To get started making this type of image, you’ll need access to an image editing software. A commonly used program is Photoshop.

Before creating your main image, you will need to decide how big you want each individual image to appear in your quiz. Most picture box quizzes use square images, though you don’t necessarily have to, as long as every image is the same size. Both the width and height for the individual images should fall somewhere between 100-200 pixels. In our example, each individual image is 150×150 pixels. 

Once you’ve determined how big to make your individual images, you can begin working on the main image. When you create a new image in Photoshop, you can select the image width and height. The width is easy – it will be the same width you chose for your individual images. The height is a little trickier. Since you will be stacking your individual images into one long column, the height of your main image should be the height of your individual images multiplied by the total number of images that will be in the quiz.

In our example, the height of individual images are 150 pixels, and there are 8 total, so the height for that main image is 1,200 pixels (150 x 8).

Once the main image is set up, you can begin to place the smaller individual images within it. A helpful way to do this is by creating your individual images in a separate Photoshop tab, and copy and pasting them over into the main image. When doing this step, it is of the utmost importance that each individual image is the exact same size, and that they are placed properly within the main image (if individual images overlap, even by the smallest of margins, you picture box quiz might not appear properly).

Once your main image is complete, save it as either a gif, png or jpg. Upload your image to a hosting site like Imgur. Once the image is uploaded, paste the URL for the image in the Game Info tab. Be sure that you use the direct image URL, which is what you need for images in other quiz types. 

Extra Info: Click Here to find more information about adding images to quizzes on Sporcle.

2. Entering Data

Once your image has been created and pasted into the Game Info tab, you can begin to fill in data for your quiz.

From the ‘Game Info’ tab, you can do things like set a time length and pick a category for your quiz.

The ‘Options’ tab allows you to set various quiz preferences, like what kind of answers will be accepted in the quiz, and whether or not you want to hide the image before the quiz starts.

In the ‘Data’ tab, you can enter quiz answers. The order of answers should correspond to the individual image order (i.e., the first image in our example is of Shawn Kemp, so the first answer in our data column should be “Shawn Kemp” as well, and so on).

In the ‘Data’ tab, you can also add hints. These will display on your quiz only if you go to the ‘Options’ tab and select ‘Display Hints’.

3. Quiz Style

The ‘Style’ tab is very important for picture box quizzes. Here, you can select the number of columns you want for your quiz. You also want to be mindful of the ‘Answer Space’ and ‘Font size’; adjusting these can really help improve the look and feel of your quiz. Generally speaking, the ‘Answer Space’ should not be too large, as it can look bad.

Finishing Up

Once you have added a quiz image, adjusted all your quiz data, and made sure your quiz looks good, you can then wrap things up by adding a few appropriate tags. Make sure to give your quiz a few good tests to make sure everything is working as you expect it to, then you can move over to the ‘Finish Up’ tab, and select either ‘Launch Game to the Public’ or ‘Make Game Private’. Private quizzes are only viewable to you, or to others who have a direct URL link to it.

Hopefully you found this picture box guide useful. If you’re interested in learning how to create other quiz types, be sure to read our other quiz creation guides.

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