Report the object, not the picture

There are two ways a paid render can disappoint you, and they feel identical in the moment. In one, the film is competent and you simply wanted something else — the camera stayed wide when you wanted the macro, the light is flatter than the mood promised, the set reads colder than your brand. In the other, the object on screen is not your object: a letter in the wordmark is wrong, a clasp has been redrawn, a matte finish has come back glossy, a colourway has shifted half a shade. Both are a wasted render. Only the second one is a question a machine can settle.

What the check actually rules on

When you report a render, an automatic pass compares it against the reference photo you uploaded and asks one question: did the product drift. Not whether the film is good, not whether it flatters you, not whether the crop is right. If the product drifted, that render's credits go back to your balance. If the complaint is about angle, lighting, background, crop or taste, the pass says so honestly rather than guessing, and your note is passed on as feedback to the people who can act on it.

That second outcome is not a rejection and is not held against you. But it is the part sellers do not expect: it still consumed one of your reports.

The number nobody tells you

You can file ten reports in a rolling seven days, and the count is on filing, not on being right. A report that comes back out of scope counts. A report that comes back finding no drift counts. The only thing that does not count is a pass that errored on our side, because an outage of ours must never charge you for it. Separately, a paid render can be reported for thirty days, and each render can be reported once.

The cap is deliberately on filing rather than on upholding, and the reason is worth knowing because it tells you what the allowance is for. A seller who hits a genuinely bad batch — a model update that starts redrawing a particular kind of clasp across a dozen renders — must not be locked out of reporting for being right about all of them. Ten filings a week is enough room for that. It is not enough room to also route your general disappointment through the same button.

A test you can apply in four seconds

Put the render next to the photograph you uploaded and ask whether a buyer holding the parcel would say the picture showed a different object. Not a worse picture of the same object — a different object.

• Wordmark, lettering, serial or care label reads differently — report it. This is the clearest case and the one the check is most confident on.
• A part has been redrawn: a clasp, a cap, a hinge, a strap keeper, a seam that runs the wrong way — report it.
• A finish has changed state — matte gone glossy, brushed gone mirrored, woven gone printed. Report it.
• A colour has moved far enough that a buyer would call it the wrong colourway — report it. A grade that reads slightly warm across the whole frame is not this.
• The camera chose an angle you did not want, or held a wide when you wanted a detail — regenerate, or change the brief. Nothing to report.
• The light is flat, the set is cold, the mood is not yours — regenerate. Nothing to report.
• The crop, the aspect or where the product sits in frame — a framing choice, not a drift. Nothing to report.

The line is the object, every time. If you find yourself writing a sentence that begins "I wanted", you are describing a picture, and the fix is a fresh take rather than a report.

Two mechanics that change what you should do

The unit is the render, never the job. An image set is a number of independently rendered stills, and one wrong packshot out of six returns one still's credits, not the set's. This cuts the other way too: reporting the whole set because one frame is wrong does not exist as an action. Find the render that is wrong and report that one, which also means you are describing a specific defect rather than a general unease — and a specific defect is what the check is good at.

And the amount returned is the amount that was charged, read back rather than recalculated. Whatever has changed about pricing between the render and the report, the reversal agrees with the charge. That is a small thing until it is not.

Why the window exists

Thirty days is not an arbitrary patience limit. The check needs both files — your reference photo and the render — to still exist, and stored media is swept on a retention schedule. Past the sweep there is nothing left to compare, so a window longer than the retention would not be generous, it would be a promise that quietly errors. If you are going to look at a render properly, the useful habit is to look at it in the week you ordered it, while the comparison is still possible and while you still remember what you asked for.

Where to send everything else

None of this means your taste complaints are unwelcome. They are the more useful feedback, most of the time — they say something about what the product should learn to do, where a drift report only says that one render went wrong. Send them the way feedback is meant to arrive rather than through the report button, and you keep the ten for the thing they are for.

The underlying reason to care is the same reason the guarantee exists at all. A film built from your own photograph can stand as evidence on a listing, and evidence is worth defending precisely at the point where the object stops being the object. A film you merely dislike has not stopped being evidence. It is just not the one you wanted, and the answer to that is another take.