Why is my camera app inaccurate?

I'm not really sure how to explain it, but the camera app is very misleading on my phone!

I took a picture of a part of a bank statement (a joke between me and my friends), and I made sure you could only see that one payment. I was about to post it on Facebook and realised that my camera had actually taken a bigger picture (that happened to include more sensitive information) than what was on screen when I took the picture.

The camera actually takes bigger pictures than what appears on the camera app. A very mild frustration, but I wondered if anyone had any fixes? Maybe I changed a setting by accident? I have to take pictures remembering that the picture is actually going to include bits to the left/right/above/below that aren't shown on the app.

I have never noticed this, but can confirm that mine is the same way. This tends to suggest that it was not some setting that you inadvertantly changed.

Most viewfinders, even ones on screen, only show somewhere in the area of 90-95% of what the sensor is actually capturing. You'll see this much more often on dSLR cameras with optical viewfinders than phones, because they market it more heavily. (i.e. advertising that "Canon camera x"'s viewfinder has 97% coverage)

This doesn't fix the camera issue, but the crop tool can quickly take care of the image.

That's how the preview function of the camera app is made. Anandtech writes about this in their review:

"The Nexus 4 makes the same annoying UX decision as the iPhone 5 and shows an aspect-crop in its preview instead of the full field of view. Put simply, the top and bottom of the image are cropped off in the preview, but appear in the image. I realize that this eliminates letterboxing in the preview and makes it take up all of the usable display space, but what you see is not what you get at all when taking pictures on the Nexus 4."

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That's because the aspect ratio of the pictures is more square than the screen. The only way to fix that is to have giant buttons or a lot of empty space.