Revamp to allow images with different aspect ratios

[jrosindell]

We've got a design around square images which is nice but to what extent is this a pinch point - perhaps we should allow uncropped images to appear at least on leaves and possibly on signposts as well.

[davidebbo]

Sort of duplicate of https://github.com/OneZoom/tree-build/issues/78, though that one conflates ratings and crops.

[hyanwong]

I'm not that keen, to be honest. Or at least, we can't allow arbitrary sizes (e.g. 10 px x 2000 px for a snake). The neatness and convenience of square crops is very helpful e.g. on the main page, and it focusses attention on getting a decent resolution image of the "important" part of an organism. If we have a mix of portrait and landscape images in the 4x2 composites of internal nodes, it is likely to look a bit rubbish.

On the leaves what's to be gained by allowing non-square aspect ratios? Isn't this the same as tweaking the crop algorithm to add transparency above and below (or left and right)? I worry that we will then accept images which will appear tiny compared to others.

[davidebbo]

I think we're reacting to seeing really bad square AI crops of skinny images. But things probably would look a lot more reasonable if we used the best possible square crops of those images.

Let's take a fairly extreme example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Moanasaurus2.png

Right now, we're showing the tail:

But it could look like:

And of course, that doesn't capture the true shape of the animal, but it's not terrible, and it avoids all the issues of having a non-square image that ends up looking tiny. Sort of a case of finding the lesser evil...