Your map should include a preview picture. This picture will be visible from the game menu and from the servers vote screen.
In order to do so:
-* Load your map in the game
-* Use the command `r_letterbox -1` in the console to turn off the HUD
+* Load your map in the game and stay observer
+* Use the command `r_letterbox -1` in the console to turn off the HUD (not `r_letterbox 1` as it'd add top and bottom borders)
* If your map has "waypoint" entities (like CTF or CTS maps), you can hide them with `cl_hidewaypoints 1`
+* turn off jpeg compression with `scr_screenshot_jpeg 0` to avoid a double lossy compression (you'll have to compress it to jpg later)
* Take a nice screenshot with F12
* Go to your Xonotic user directory, on the `data/screenshot` subdirectory. Your user directory location depends on your operating system, more information [here](https://xonotic.org/faq/#config).
-* Open the screenshot with an image editor, e.g. GIMP
-* Crop it so that it has a 4:3 ratio
-* Scale it to 512x512 px (weird but standard)
-* Save it as a JPG file (~90% quality)
+* Open the generated .tga screenshot with an image editor, e.g. GIMP
+* Crop it so that it has a 4:3 ratio, e.g. if resolution is 1366x768 then crop it to 1024x768
+* Scale it to 512x512 px (the resulting image should appear vertically stretched)
+* Save it (export in Gimp) as a JPG file (~90% quality); other formats like tga and png aren't acceptable because they generally produce much bigger files
* Put it in the same location as the bsp file, with the same name (see next chapter for packaging rules).
Original source of information: https://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=6067&pid=75757#pid75757