Do not crop image thumbnails

[snaggen]

Images thumbnails in posts are currently cropped to a wide aspect ratio. This basically destroys the image, when you take a photograph composition and framing is important. Show the whole image or not at all. You wouldn't take a text post and loop that through google translate multiple times and distort it.....

[ghost]

I have the same image as the web interface.
can you send an example ? 🤔

[snaggen]

https://mastodon.social/users/WelshPixie/updates/2198888

[snaggen]

If you look at that post in Tusky, the thumbnail is cropped wide compared to the real image you get when clicking on it. I don't know how it looks in the web gui, since I have not used that.

[snaggen]

Ok, clicking on this link on Android opens the web with an even worse crop....

[Vavassor]

This is a bit rambly, but here's concerns with different possibilities.

Not cropping with one image is mostly fine, but it becomes a problem in cases like where you have a tall portrait orientation image but your device is turned landscape. So you get a huge tall image that fills up the timeline and you can't even see it on the screen at once. You could limit how much space it fills by setting a maximum scale size to prevent this. But it can be kind of ugly with some image shapes because of how much negative space it leaves to the sides.

With multiple images, you need them to all be the same aspect ratio to have a photoset layout. Putting the images all one after another is an option, but you will end up with very long posts. And in a photoset the only options are cropping or letterboxing. Letterboxing could work, but if you pair wide and tall images in the same set it'll end up with images that are mostly margin and so small you can't tell what they are.

Also, another possibility is to shorten long posts and have an "expand" button. But for photosets this is a weird choice, because you started with a cropped image where you can't see the whole pictures and now you have a shortened post where you can't see ANY images (until you expand it).

[snaggen]

I agree that there will be aspect ratios that will be suboptimal. But that is already the case, just that now the portrait case currently shows the lower part of the face and the upper part of the chest instead of pillar boxing. I suggest to define a max height, the same as the current width an then scale to that using original aspect ratio, pillar box if needed.

[snaggen]

In general I would look at how this is handled in Google+, they worked close with the photo community to get thing to look good both to photographers and regular users.

Edit: just took a look at G+ and they let portrait photos fill the width that makes them very tall and take much space in the feed. I don't think that will feel good in the mastodon world. I think a max height and pillar boxing would be the best.
For collections they only show the first image, and a little bit of the next image on the right side to indicate you can see that by swiping right. That is a ok solution, but I don't necessarily think that is better than a collection like Tusky have now.

Also, it might be ok, to do some cropping when a mosaic is generated for a collection preview. Since for a collection view, the user will understand that the collection preview is generated, and clicks to see the single images. But single images are rarely clicked on, but only looked at as the user scrolls down the feed.

[connyduck]

This should be fixed, since 1.4 images in timelines have a better aspect ratio.