Since the post thumbnails got implemented a couple of weeks ago, the main page got a lot more, how do I put it, untidier. Before, it was very clean and unifying, with every post being roughly the same, and in theme with the rest of the design.
But after thumbnails it got a little messy. With images having different aspect ratios, sometimes not loading (just as a technical side issue). Images extracted from the articles are generally ugly and don’t have much to do with the actual context of the article (at least in my view).
I would actually prefer completely getting rid of any images (except for memes and any other picture-based formats), since this way all the focus is given to the actual contexts of a post and posts look nicer imo. Also, this reduces the page size a lot, which is nice. Dunno, maybe a compromise could be reached with specific criteria for aspect ratios…
Just wanted to ask if I’m the only person who’s bothered by that?
/u/dessalines, /u/nutomic, thoughts?
The transition and placeholder ideas are good, but I tried out the cropping / static aspect ratio a while back and hated it.
Its a problem because square images get blank space to become rectangles, rectangles get important content chopped off, for things like phone wallpapers, you have no idea what it is because its a square now, etc. With fluid images, you get not just the content, but the shape of what you are seeing, which in a thumbnail is sometimes just as important.
If you don’t want to crop, you could also work out and store the aspect ratios of each thumbnail (which should be easy to get since Lemmy stores its own thumbnails now) and send that in the post metadata so the image element is already the right size when the page loads.
Also, do you have a width limit for images? Otherwise if a post has a very wide image, it could mess up the UI.
There’s no limit, but they actually don’t look bad. Here’s one with a wide thumbnail.
I was more thinking of really wide thumbnails, like a 10:1 banner for a website.
You could test it out, it pry wouldn’t look that bad. The main thing is that the content around the image, the text and all, should wrap well.
https://lemmy.ml/post/30945
Apparently it just makes the image shorter, which is good, but now the “expand image” icon is tiny.
There are a few different ways of cropping images. For example, Mastodon lets you manually set the focus of the image, and keeps that point centered when it crops the image.