As regular contributors to this pack will have noticed, the amount of images that the community has been producing has increased a lot over the last year and a half or so. Whereas previously update packs would be released every 4-5 weeks and contain around 3,500 images, they are now being released every 3-4 weeks and contain in the region of 6,000 images. This has seen the total amount of images in the megapack go from around 244,000 in January 2020 to 323,000 by the most recent update pack and certainly 325,000 by the time the next update pack is released in the coming week or so, and that's just new images without taking into consideration the amount of improvements added.

This wouldn't have been possible without the fantastic work done by the cutters and requesters providing high-quality images for free to the community, so well done to all 👏

However, the increase in images being cut has also been accompanied by a similar increase in images being requested, with the result that there are in the region of 8,000 images awaiting to be cut, with well over 400 packs, some of which have been pending for a number of months. The vast majority of them are of a very good quality indeed and should be quite straight-forward to cut, and I always feel it's a pity that so many excellent sources are not cut.

In order to try and make a dent in the list of pending images before it gets out of hand, I would like to ask the community to try and whittle it down over the coming weeks/months. I'm aware we're never going to cut all the images being requested in a brief timeframe, but that doesn't mean that we as a community shouldn't aim to do so 😉

When choosing which sources to cut, perhaps cutters could decide to prioritise some of the pending images in the older packs. I would also suggest avoid cutting people whose current cut is quite recent and of a very good quality; after all, if a player has had a Euro 2020 cut, for example, it's extremely unlikely he'll definitely need another cut made again now.

I would also ask requesters to be a bit more selective in what sources to request, keeping the above in mind. It's always better to have a very recent cut, naturally, but in some cases it might be better to avoid requesting some images if they are similar to the current team, instead of requesting the whole team. Perhaps requesters can also consider whether it might be worth trying their hand at cutting some of the images they request, instead of having to depend on others to cut their images at their convenience. With remove.bg and photopea.com, there has never been a better time to produce excellent cut-outs quickly and easily, as evidenced by the first paragraph.

tl;dr - let's all try and keep the pending image request list at a manageable level 😉

The cut-outs for the base megapack for FM22 will be uploaded in the next 10-12 days or so. It would be great if cutters working on images keep it in mind so that it is as comprehensive as possible 🙂 Of course, an update pack will follow shortly after that, and another one after that, as per usual 😉

Especially those who have images from request packs on their WIP which have been there for quite a while (from these pages), such as @leftfoot and @krissmed and @12345cieza. If you're not working on them, no problem, just remove them from your WIP or tell me so I can do it for you. Maybe if they're back on the market they can get picked up 😉 Most probably they've just slipped your mind…

thx a lot！