Images should not be cropped when showing thumbnails

[anandology]

It looks very odd here https://images.hasgeek.com/pyconindia

[jace]

I can't see that page because I'm not an owner of the pyconindia organization. We chose to show square-cropped thumbnails as that gives us more flexibility with the UI layout, allowing us to design something that works on both desktop and mobile.

However, I do agree it looks odd if you aren't expecting it.

[anandology]

This is what I see.

[jace]

Looks like cropping was a bad idea. It works for photos but not logos.

[miteshashar]

We could fit the image into the square thumbnail. In some (rare)cases that would reduce the visibility of the logo in the thumbnail.

[anandology]

Shouldn't we be doing something like this?

[jace]

Google Search, Plus and others have switched to using thumbnails with the original aspect ratio, but with a layout engine that fills them on screen without gaps. This is similar to what can be achieved with Masonry.js, except Masonry uses vertical layout while Google, et al use horizontal layouts.

Given that the UI is unusable with cropped logos, I recommend we switch to uncropped thumbnails or content-aware cropping immediately. (The latter is non-trivial and may be for another time.)