Disappointing photos show what it's like to go to San Diego Comic-Con in real life

San Diego Comic-Con is a popular event, but it comes with challenges and frustrations.Daniel Knighton/Getty Images; Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

• San Diego Comic-Con is one of the largest, most popular entertainment conventions.
• While Insider's reporters enjoyed other parts of the convention, they found that it can be more frustrating than it looks on social media.

Whether you were entering or exiting SDCC, you couldn't avoid crowds of people.

SDCC takes place in San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter.      Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

This is how long a line was for fans to reach a COVID verification tent where you needed to acquire a wristband in order to attend the convention floor.

You couldn't enter the SDCC grounds unless you had a flimsy orange wristband verifying your proof of vaccination or a recent negative test.      Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Mandatory COVID wristbands that needed to be worn to enter the convention every day became flimsy, gross, and faded as the week continued.

The wristband over the course of the four-day event. We overheard attendees who complained of their wristbands disintegrating and coming off while showering.      Olivia Singh/Insider

Fans had to circumvent train tracks that ran parallel to the convention center, which made it more difficult to get to different activities.

San Diego Comic-Con festivities are divided by a train track with limited options to cross.      Olivia Singh/Insider

Foot traffic got congested by the entrances to the San Diego Convention Center.

Attending SDCC requires a lot of patience.      Daniel Knighton/Getty Images

Once inside you had to navigate through even more clusters of people, with limited space to walk the floor.

Funkoville was one of the most popular and crowded areas at SDCC.      Daniel Knighton/Getty Images

Attendees sat on the floor to catch a break before security guards inevitably walked by to tell them they weren't allowed to do that because it was a hazard.

By Sunday, people were sitting all over the convention center floor because there was barely any seating to be found for the thousands of guests who attended.      Kirsten Acuna/Insider

Lines to get into popular activations were long and involved waiting for hours outdoors, with the hot sun beating down on fans.

We waited two-and-a-half hours on Sunday to get into the "Abbott Elementary" activation.      Olivia Singh/Insider

An endless line of attendees camped out for days, sleeping outdoors, in order to get into Marvel Studios' popular Saturday night panel at Hall H.

The line snaked behind the convention center, along the marina, to enter the hall which seats over 6,000 people.      Olivia Singh/Insider

Follow along with Insider's San Diego Comic-Con coverage here.

If you received a ticket from a panel to receive swag, you had to make a 12-minute trek outside of the convention center to the back of a hotel to trade it inside an unsuspecting room.

Guests had to go to the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego Hotel, but many thought it was a different hotel. By the end of Sunday, the line to get in this room extended down the marina.      Kirsten Acuna/Insider