Abstract: A distributed, cross reality system efficiently and accurately compares location information that includes image frames. Each of the frames may be represented as a numeric descriptor that enables identification of frames with similar content. The resolution of the descriptors may vary for different computing devices in the distributed system based on degree of ambiguity in image comparisons and/or computing resources for the device. A descriptor computed for a cloud-based component operating on maps of large areas that can result in ambiguous identification of multiple image frames may use high resolution descriptors. High resolution descriptors reduce computationally intensive disambiguation processing. A portable device, which is more likely to operate on smaller maps and less likely to have the computational resources to compute a high resolution descriptor, may use a lower resolution descriptor.