I'm trying to replace the Pleasantview pictures with better, more quality 16;9 ones, but every time I put them in, replace the names, all I get is THIS. Is this even possible?!

If you're using a picture creating program outside of the Maxis storytelling ones, no.
That one only recognizes the Maxis pictures-they are configured to the exact size and style of their parameters.

I'd love to have my own pictures of the neighborhoods in the folder, but it won't work. It's a far better program than the Maxis picture taking one is.

It should be possible, but it would involve editing the photos to fit as well as renaming them.

@Peni Griffin how?

I think they either have to be the same size, or the same size format (4:3, I think, check out the size of the lager pictures in the non-neighborhood Screenshots folder), and in jpg. They also need to have the same name as the original.

Not sure if it works, but it is possible to switch out photographies (there is a tutorial somewhere), so it may be possible to switch out the album pics too.

was able to do it! yay!!! https://i.imgur.com/PnRzXff.png

The aspect ratio would have to be the same, at minimum, and yes, it'd have to be a jpeg. Take a Large/High quality snapshot with the game camera so you can compare properties as you experiment. I have never done more than trim a photo - I've never even owned PhotoShop - so I'm not the best person to walk you through that part. Personally I find the snapshots, at Large/High, perfectly adequate for my own purposes.

Looking at your screenshot, it appears that you have successfully made and renamed a thumbnail and that the game is at least trying to read a larger picture connected to it, so it looks as though you have the naming protocols down. Now you just need to figure out what the album's choking on trying to read the larger picture.

It might be less tedious for you to edit and test the picture using the storybook reader utility, which lets you read and edit albums without having the game open. http://www.geocities.ws/coltswalker/s2album/index.html (Yes, that's a geocities address. It's old. But it works.)

@simmer22, you don't have to replace existing photos, just use the correct naming protocol. The first and second elements (snapshot/thumbnail/webentry and HouseholdID ) are how the program identifies whether a picture, thumbnail, and album belong together and how they relate to each other. The third element identifies the individual picture and can be anything at all. I've renamed album photos by giving them descriptive third elements that I can read and understand, and the album reads them just fine. The only time you'd want to replace an original would be, if you'd already arranged the album and decided that you wanted to replace a particular picture in the album with a screenshot. In which case you'd edit the screenshot, make a thumbnail of it, and rename the screenshot and thumbnail with the names of the snapshot and thumbnail (which would be the same, except for the first element) of the picture being replaced.

I haven't used the ingame albums in over 10 years (most likely sometime before I started using printscreen), so I haven't looked too much into how the screenshots work. I mostly use them for remembering which families are in which neighborhood, from the auto Family photo after CAS.