Camera and Photos

Camera and Photos

A native, dependency-free photo feature - no Camera mod or other external image-capture dependency. See Architecture § Platform support for which targets have this working today.

A phone that isn't registered yet, or is locked (hasn't been signed into this session), can't take a photo through any entry point below - you'll get a "unlock this phone" message instead.

Taking a photo

Three ways into the same full-screen capture overlay:

• The camera icon inside a conversation - the shot is sent straight into that conversation.
• The home screen's Photo icon - a standalone shot, saved to the phone's own photo list.
• Punching while holding the phone (left-click, whether at a block, an entity, or empty air) - same standalone capture as the Photo icon, just a one-punch shortcut into it.

Inside the overlay:

• Mouse wheel zooms in/out.
• Right-click shoots - a shutter sound plays immediately, then the shot uploads.
• Left-click or Escape cancels back out.
• The mouse stays grabbed the whole time (not released like a normal screen), so you can still look around while framing a shot; the vanilla HUD and held item are hidden while the overlay is open.

The server keeps two resolutions per photo: a small thumbnail (shown by default in chat, as the saved photo item's icon, and in My Photos) and a larger full-size version, fetched on demand only when a photo is actually opened full-size - neither is ever broadcast to players who don't need it.

My Photos

Reachable from the home screen (next to the Photo icon), My Photos is a flat, scrollable grid of every photo the phone owns - no album/folder layer, unlike the old Camera-mod-backed version this replaces. Left-click a thumbnail to select it (amber border), right-click to open it full-size. With one or more photos selected:

• Delete - removes them permanently.
• Take into inventory - gives you a physical photo item for each, that re-opens the same full-size viewer on right-click.
• Send - only shown when My Photos was reached from inside a conversation (via an "attach an existing photo" entry point next to that conversation's camera icon); posts the selected photos into that conversation without re-uploading them.

Photo item

Right-clicking a saved photo item reopens the full-size viewer (Back / Save to Inventory). Held in hand, the photo always renders at the same visual width regardless of the photo's actual resolution - only the height adapts to the photo's aspect ratio.

Sneak-presenting

Sneak while holding a photo item to hold it up in front of you with both hands, visible both to yourself (first-person) and to everyone else nearby (third-person):

• First-person: rendered as a real, lit 3D object in the world - using the same rendering path as the third-person view - rather than a flat, unlit GUI overlay. It's centered on screen and stays camera-relative as you look around.
• Third-person: your arms bend to hold the card up, perpendicular to your body regardless of head yaw, with the correct face toward the viewer.
• Both hands grip the card, one on each side, positioned so the hands and the card's own 3D model can overlap naturally rather than floating apart from it.

Like the item's normal held rendering, the presented card is always the same visual width regardless of the photo's resolution.

This is a compiled-in, always-on visual feature - there's no toggle for it. On a dev build, the underlying 3D transform (position, scale, rotation signs/offsets, hand-grip offsets) can be live-tuned in-game via the Fabric-only /presentdebug command; see Commands § Debug.