While I can't agree that square thumbnails are better looking than proportionate ones - sorry, they just aren't to my eyes - I understand time issues very well, Dave. There is unfortunately just so many hours in a day and of course you must ultimately also present the site in the way you prefer yourself .

Interesting!

For the record: I didn't actually bring up any points--Asa just borrowed my picture.
And it is a great (although extreme) example of an image that I didn't put into the photo contest and wouldn't put into the database precisely because of the thumbnail.

And, I also agree with the points that they, Asa and William, brought up, plus I have a few of my own.

The centered, square crop can be such a horrendous representation of the full image and nowhere is this more apparent than in the site banners forum! There are many hideous thumbnails of glorious banners on display there.
It is probably easier to get an idea of the basic color or gist of the thing with the square though because a tiny little stripe as the thumbnail would be indecipherable. And as sooby points out, on a phone, forget it!
However, I am quite certain that the thumbnails as displayed for review and selection or exclusion by admin are represented larger and with the correct aspect ratio because it is necessary to view them that way given their shape and purpose.
And, of course it would be possible to redesign how they are displayed in that forum, but is that necessary? IDK, for our collective in-house purposes, probably not

In pondering this, I came to the conclusion that if,
for example,
google image search or my own image files--when set to display icons--presented me with uniform, square centered crops of every image
that would be really aggravating to me and NOT useful.

As an aside--thankfully, google images does display many ATP images with the correct aspect ratio, but did you know that google images also displays a ton of the 'ATP crop' too? which is not 'clickable' to view corrected? That may or may not be a downside depending on the image and so many other things from the viewers' perspective. But if you want to see ruined images, just do a google image search for ATP banners and check out the 250 x 250 that comes up!

I really don't know how important it is to consider what ATP provides to the search engines and web crawlers. I do know that if I search for images from NARGS, for example, which is another gardening site that happens to have lots and lots of photos, the images that come up are not ever poorly cropped by artificial construct because the site doesn't do that. Personally, I wish this site didn't either and I'd prefer not to see the 'bad' crops, on google pages, from ATP at all, but especially when they're mine :blushing:

I really don't like to see them here either:



The only saving grace is that here the images are clickable and I love the fact that there is not a cap on the height!
and I am a clicker and scroller

I totally get that this is not a photo site and that the default thumbnail dictates.
I still submit a few bad thumbnails cuz I like the photo if you click it and some people do click on them.
Mostly though, I don't submit them.

One of the things I like best about All Things Plants is the ease of adding photos directly from my computer. Many other sites require members to use a photo hosting site...sheesh, what a lot of work that entails The thumbnails on ATP save space and if all we have to do is click to see the full image, well, that's not very difficult. Dave has a pretty good thing going here.

@Greene,I don't think I or anyone else has ever claimed it to be very difficult to click to see a full image? Rather the question was if it was possible to get a more correct aspect ratio to the thumbnails and to some extent how inclined the average user was to click on a poorly cropped thumbnail. I just want to clarify that so there is no confusion

Likewise no one has complained and said that is was difficult to upload images here. I don't understand how this even got in the discussion? Do you mean that because one thing works satisfactory, we should ignore other issues? Always difficult to suggest changes as people may take it as a negative, although it's not, it's a way to go forward. For sure this is a wonderful place and many things work absolutely great, but that hopefully doesn't mean one need to stagnate when there is a chance to go forward instead?

Here is what I posted: "One of the things I like best about All Things Plants is the ease of adding photos directly from my computer. Many other sites require members to use a photo hosting site...sheesh, what a lot of work that entails Blinking The thumbnails on ATP save space and if all we have to do is click to see the full image, well, that's not very difficult. Dave has a pretty good thing going here. Thumbs up "


William,
Thank you for perceiving my post as negative. It is a mystery why you (or anyone) would read my positive post praising Dave and ATP and see negativity.

William said:
I'm not a programmer...

You are admittedly not a programmer; neither am I. Neither are most of the 35,000+ members of ATP. I'm pretty sure the words "aspect ratio" are not even in the vocabulary of the average ATP member.

Most of us...most...are quite happy with the work that @dave has done with All Things Plants. Is there room for improvement? Yes, I'm sure there will always be room for improvement. Dave makes changes almost every week to make this the best plant-related site (as Dave said...not a photo-related site) on the internet. It was only 14 months ago that Dave added a photography forum to ATP, followed up by our first photo contest. As for me...and I can only speak for myself...I am quite happy with the thumbnails just the way they are. I know that I must make one tiny little motion with a single finger to click and see the full image. It works for me...and I am quite positive about that.

Who knows? In time Dave may decide to create a whole new website devoted strictly to images of plants...hey, it could happen because he is Super Dave. You have only been a member here on ATP since May of 2015. Perhaps after you get to know the site better you may enjoy it more.

I hope my post will not be misinterpreted this time.

Here's the deal with stuff like this on a site like this:

1. Dave's site, Dave's calls on things.
2. It's a crowd-sourced site. That means that the site owner depends on the participants for content.

So a tacit contract or implied covenant is in play. Specifically, the content providers (the rabble like you and me) get to provide content and make suggestions to better our community and to tune things where we think they can be improved. That's our half of the bargain. Dave's half of the bargain is that he gets to reject or accept the tunings (for whatever reasons he has - practical, aesthectic, personal, vision, whatever, etc.).

That's part of the deal that the site owner makes with the content providers on a crowd-sourced site. So we, the rabble, have a stake in the site and an interest in the site - and make suggestions from time to time. Nature of this particular beast. And, necessarily, some of the discussions will be more esoteric than others. We all have our interests and areas of expertise.

This particular conversation is about how photos are displayed. It is, as Greene points out, rather immaterial or uninteresting to perhaps the majority of the members. But that doesn't mean that it's not significant nor worthy of discussion. Crowdsourced sites leverage the expertise of the contributors - so don't be quick to knock something that falls out of William's brain. He knows a thing or two about photos, aesthetics, and presentation.

Historically Dave's been really amenable to practical suggestions. And, not to put words in his mouth, but I've seen him implement several suggestions that people have made.

Whether anything comes of it, this conversation on the aspect ratio of the thumbnails is both interesting and useful. And something worthy of discussion for a lot of reasons - both internally (to the site itself) and externally (how the site and its contents is displayed in search engines). The discussion is not a condemnation. It's a tuning suggestion. And, all things equal, those in charge of stuff welcome suggestions (as does Dave) - and they consider them - and choose to implement them or not. Something as elegant as this site doesn't fall out of a single brain.

----
So.....................in continuance of the conversation - and to make a point that dirt brought up to me - this is also something to consider with the thumbnails: ATP photos show up on Google (and other search engines') image search. Not just the photos that we upload to the database, but the thumbnail crops as well. Here's a GIS that I did for ATP. Turns out that my photo of dead willow leaves shows up first - with its thumbnail trailing it (google displays differently for everyone depending on your history, btw, so your results will necessarily vary):


Relative to the pictures, I see three pretty dumb thumbnails that really look pretty bad and represent neither the pictures nor the site well. They follow:


I know there's been some reluctance in this thread about "whitespace" and borders - but...I think that's been misunderstood.

SO...were the aspect ratio preserved, this is what the thumbnails WOULD look like in a GIS (top row proposed vs. bottom row now):



Notice that you can actually see the photo, they're still displayed in a square/grid, the whitespace is not bordered, and the composition isn't screwy.

None of these are particularly good photos. But they're the ones that showed up first in my GIS as examples. I can find many, many more if anyone is interested - and I'm pretty certain that I can find much more egregious examples.

Sorry for all the words. The point of the 2nd half of this post is: the square cut in making thumbnails shows up in image searches - and doesn't necessarily put the site's best foot forward.
----

Finally, to the question of coding: I'm not a coder either, but I've done a good bit of web development. The customizable idea that William had would be really complicated. Shrinking the photo to 250pixels (or whatever) max width/height would be no more complicated than cutting a square out of the middle (arguably less so). So as far as the coding goes, I'm guessing that's a non-factor in preserving the aspect ratio. In my mind, it comes down to tradition (this is the way we do things here) and taste.

I brought up the image search notion because I think it's an unintended (and unconsidered) byproduct of the square chop.

It's good feedback and I appreciate the time you took in putting it out there for consideration. Your points are good, and it would probably be good to in the future run some experiments on ATP. In an ideal scenario I would wave my wand and do it just like has been described in this thread. Maybe one day I'll do just that. But for now, I just have way too many other things going on to devote any time to the thumbnails.

Hmmm... do I see some experimenting going on in the forum threads?

Yes, I'm trying out the aspect ratio again. This time, I'm thinking I implemented it in a way that won't disrupt people's "First unread" functionality.