Backgrounds for Banks

August 25, 2019 9:54 AM

A twitter thread delving deeply and nerdily into the background images you see when you log into a Chase bank account.
posted by mygothlaundry (28 comments total)

I love this thread! I caught it two days ago and was immediately like "What is my image?" Well my image is a covered bridge like most of New England. Bah. Rex's writeup is so good "Maybe I like to imagine managing this project. I would want to die."
posted by jessamyn at 10:03 AM on August 25, 2019

Here's mine for day, which, OK, Oregon, that makes sense. But this is not night, people.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:08 AM on August 25, 2019

I've noticed ours changes images every 6ish months, I think. It was a view of Santa Monica for day and I think Griffith Park at night the first time I realized it was localized, and then something else for a while, and the yellow umbrella photo in the tweet thread is pretty new.

I also would not wish to manage this project.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:08 AM on August 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I like to imagine Chase has some internal program encouraging employees to showcase their own photography. Maybe for a modest cash bonus.
posted by Nelson at 10:14 AM on August 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm all out of bubblegum.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:19 AM on August 25, 2019

I worked on kind of a similar project once when this idea of using big photos as a background was feasible for the first time. There was definitely a lot of conversation around like ok what photos? Where do we get them? How do we choose them? But nothing like this level of customization, I wonder if they hired a temp with a spreadsheet of zip codes or what. I noticed that most of the suburbs around NYC use the NYC photo but upstate has a more rural photo so there must be something making that distinction. That is the kind of thing I did as a temp.
posted by bleep at 10:38 AM on August 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Aw, Louisville gets the Florida day photo. That one would be OK for some of our State Forests but nowhere in the immediate Louisville area looks remotely like that. Our evening photo is a pretty good match for anywhere on the Ohio or Mississippi, though. I don't think those are our bridges, and that ship is flying a Tennessee flag, but it's the right kind of boat, width of river, and spacing of bridges to be Louisville-esque.
posted by jackbishop at 10:42 AM on August 25, 2019

The photos for DC change regularly. I’m pretty sure they have more time slots than day and night, too. I might log into my credit accounts too frequently.
posted by fedward at 10:48 AM on August 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

They did a decent job with Philadelphia. Vaguely American History Important Building without being specific, for day time and one of our many beautiful horticultural society managed pop-up beer gardens for night time.
posted by lazaruslong at 10:58 AM on August 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'm impressed at the amount of money that must have gone into it -- I'd have thought they'd just roll with stock photos. That many photographers in that many locations must have been fairly pricey, plus all the overhead of managing releases.
posted by tavella at 11:06 AM on August 25, 2019

This is wonderful, thank you. It's good to know i'm not the only kind of person who notices things like this
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:10 AM on August 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

The Boston one (which the author of the article captured) shows two great Boston bridges - the Zakim, which has quickly become the sort of icon that local companies now include in their logos, and the ancient drawbridge on which all trains into and out of North Station go over (and which is slated for replacement at some point, so go see it now - along with the equally cool old North Washington Street Bridge, replacement of which has begun). The park is Paul Revere Park, which, along with the Zakim, was built as part of the Big Dig project.
posted by adamg at 11:42 AM on August 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

The login screen for my wifi extender, which requires you answer security questions like it's a freaking bank or something, inexplicably has a stock photo of a kid teasing a dog with invisible food. I hate that kid, and I'm pretty sure I hate the dog too.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:42 PM on August 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

Laramie, Wyoming: Day and Night. I don't think that's downtown Laramie?
posted by jazon at 12:47 PM on August 25, 2019

It's Park City, Utah. They had blanked out most of the logos but missed the Claimjumper restaurant, and I worked backwards from there. While there is no longer one in Park City, it was there up until 2018. (Or at least the sign was, newspaper stories suggest it closed a while ago.)
posted by tavella at 1:30 PM on August 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I dug the background image url out of the Chase page. Mine is
https://static.chasecdn.com/content/geo-images/images/background.mobile.day.8.jpeg/07981.jpeg
The magic number is my zipcode. The image is a view of the NYC skyline from somewhere in NJ, but not from my zipcode.
posted by hexatron at 1:49 PM on August 25, 2019

Further to our recent discussion about zip codes vs other geographies for different purposes; this is a great example of when the zipcode is exactly the right choice. The bank already has your zip code, so they don't need to geocode any more information. They don't need highly specific geoinformation, just enough to separate major cities from each other or the remainders. And it would be creepy to have a URL that had your exact lat/long in it.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 2:38 PM on August 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

I had actually, somewhat foolishly, wondered why they were showing the whole country pictures of Atlanta.
posted by madcaptenor at 3:16 PM on August 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

Careful, directly editing a URL is considered hacking and unauthorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Really.
posted by hypnogogue at 3:23 PM on August 25, 2019 [6 favorites]

Well, the photo for my hometown of Jacksonville dispenses with the skyline and the bridges and goes straight for ginormous Treaty Oak, which is nice.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:53 PM on August 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I like the Damen Avenue L stop in Chicago. It is what comes to my mind when I contemplate savings and investments.
posted by Chitownfats at 6:14 PM on August 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

I get an image of a historic theater/ night club that is in my zip code and less than a mile a way. I had always wondered how specific they got. My city and nieghborhood appears on travel blogs and such, but being that they dont have alaska and hawaii pictures, being travel destinations doesn't help.
posted by CostcoCultist at 8:12 PM on August 25, 2019

The thread's author has not spent as much time in Michigan as I have (not surprisingly..)

> I have an annoying amount of Midwestern Pride, but have no idea what these landmarks are.

The Fleetwood Diner is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was not a frequent habitue but the "hippie hash" was a popular order when I lived in A^2.

And while I don't definitively recognize that specific windmill I think there's a pretty good chance it's the Windmill Island Gardens windmill in Holland, Michigan.
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:12 PM on August 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

The one I usually get is a park that's two blocks away from my apartment, so I was rather relieved to see the whole city is getting served that background, not just me.
posted by capricorn at 4:58 AM on August 26, 2019

And while I don't definitively recognize that specific windmill I think there's a pretty good chance it's the Windmill Island Gardens windmill in Holland, Michigan.

Yep. It's the DeZwaan Windmill. Pretty neat tour, if you are ever in the neighborhood.
posted by Preserver at 7:25 AM on August 26, 2019

That post (and these comments) somehow reminded me of those lists of little-known roadside attractions/clickbait disses thereof, except way more interesting and ground-level despite being literally UI cruft from a major bank site. Maybe it's like a scavenger hunt? Humans, we can find the magic in anything

jazon, it looks like your images are a general "non-major-city" intermountain west result - I got the same thing for Kanab, UT, and for St. George.

SLC gets its own, but the day & night pics have the same couple & dog, hiking in the hills. Too real, Chase photographer.
posted by Tess of the d'Urkelvilles at 11:14 AM on August 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Somehow, this captured my imagination today, so I pulled a whole bunch of images and found out that there are around 30 cities that get their own pictures -- including Tucson but not Minneapolis, which is interesting. And that the rest of the state gets one of seven generic images. I wrote a blog post with the details.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 4:43 PM on August 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

This was really neat. Scotia bank doesn't have these.
posted by PinkMoose at 9:02 PM on August 26, 2019