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Control gallery image size in Flexible-Width themes

  1. tma2
    Member

    Many people seemed to have the trouble that when clicking on an image in the gallery, they were taken to a medium-size version of the image.

    I have the opposite problem. When clicking on a thumbnail in a gallery, I am taken to a full-size image, and that messes up the layout of the flexible-width theme I am using (Rubric).

    I imagine that because there is no default width in the Rubric theme, the nominally "medium" image size displayed in the image view actually has no explicit size set; so it takes the original size as the default.

    Is there any way to fix this?

    Possible solutions and why they don't work/apply:
    1) Set medium image size. Cannot be done from the interface (only thumbnail size can be set).
    2) Change to fixed-width theme. I hate those narrow, horribly tall blog things, so I don't want to do this. Rubric is a very nice, easily readable theme that I like.
    3) Edit code to set image width to "width='100%'" or something similar, which would make it stretch the entire contents of its table cell. Cannot do because no access to HTML code produced by Gallery shortcode.

    Thanks for any help. Sorry if this was in the forums somewhere, I didn't find it, been looking at this stuff for a couple of hours now.

  2. justjennifer
    Member

    Please give us the link to your wordpress.com blog, starting with http://

  3. tma2
    Member

    Let me post a gallery first :) It was all done in "the sandbox" with random images and no publishing.

  4. tma2
    Member

    Here is the gallery:
    http://tma2.wordpress.com/photos-testing/
    Click on any image in a typical resolution (say 1200x800) to see what I mean. (image expanding over the sidebar)

    I'm using Firefox 2, btw, but the effect is the same in IExplore.

  5. justjennifer
    Member

    I would recommend contacting Support to advise them of your problem and see what they say about it.

    Meantime, may I make a suggestion? Resize your images yourself to the max allowed in Rubric before uploading them.
    http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/how-big-can-my-images-be/

    It is obvious that image clarity is important to you and you don't want either WordPress.com or someone's browser doing the resizing for you.
    http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/how-good-is-wordpress-at-resizing-and-resampling-your-images/

  6. tma2
    Member

    Thanks for the feedback.

    The thing about resizing is, there is no "max allowed" in Rubric because it's flexible-witdh. So depending on the browser window size (resolution+etc) the allowed size changes, and can be rather small...

    I will try to contact support. Should I just use the Support link in the Dashboard, and then Ask a Question, under Images?

  7. justjennifer
    Member

    I'm assuming that the max allowed for Rubric, 770 pixels, is exactly to avoid what is happening in your theme, but since the redesign in April, it's my understanding your image should adjust to as tsp says, "the maximum width available for your theme".

    Yep, that would be the place to report the problem, since we now have 24/7 support... :)

  8. panaghiotisadam
    Member

    @tma2: You're almost right about the fixed-width themes. The attachment page doesn't display medium-size images: it displays full-size images if they fit, scaled down to proper width if they exceed it. And you're right, of course, in that this doesn't happen with flexible-width themes.

    But the problem is more general: it has to do with the whole function of the gallery feature (which to me is not very well thought of), i.e. this phantom attachment page over which we have no control (we can't edit images, category or anything, but readers can leave comments - it's ridiculous!).

    In your case I really don't see why you wish to have your photos scaled down: they deserve to be enjoyed in full detail! In my opinion you should abandon the gallery and upload your photos the old way, so that when you click on the thumbnails you get the full-size image alone in a new window.

  9. tma2
    Member

    justjennifer:
    I'm not sure what that 770 pixels means for Rubric, because the text column can become smaller when the browser window is small. And having an image in there won't stop it from becoming smaller (as it happens in thumbnail view, for instance). In any case, 770px is rather small for the large side of a 4:3 picture. I'd like the users to be able to see the 1024 version (or maybe even a 1200 version, although that will fill up the 3GB quota faster).

    panaghiotisadam:
    Yeah, that would be the "easy" solution in the short term. However when I would manage say a gallery of 50-100+ pictures, it'd be much easier to just go in and edit captions, orderings etc. using GUI rather than coding by hand... that's the purpose of the gallery :(

    I think a good way to solve this is:
    a) Fixed-width themes: current behavior: have the image full-size if it fits, otherwise scale it down to theme width.
    b) Flexible-width themes: have the image 100% of the table cell. This is not an ideal solution, because small images will get scaled up. But it sure beats images overflowing into the sidebar. :)

    The ideal solution is to have the image either original size if it fits; or 100% of the table cell if it doesn't, but I'm not sure that's possible to do from the CSS.

    Thanks all, again. I'll also take this up with support using the Ask Question interface.

  10. justjennifer
    Member

    @tma2-Just for the purpose of discussion, look at what's going on in my photoblog's Gallery Attachment page here
    http://gammagirl.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/not-the-official-wordpresscom-gallery-faq/akko-046/

    What's not happening on Rubric is that intermediate image. That's the reason I suggested dropping a note to Support.

    @panaghiotisadam-the Gallery feature is not a panacea, but it's all we've got at the moment for uploading a number of photos and "batch processing" them. You still have the option of uploading them at one go and then choosing to display a thumbnail linking to the full-size image. It's just more time-consuming to do.

  11. justjennifer
    Member

    @panaghiotisadam-Just thought of something else: while you won't get any stats on viewing direct image links, Attachment pages will show up.

  12. tma2
    Member

    Reporting back with new information.

    I have asked Support, they have replied that this effect is an "advantage" of flexible-width theme. So clearly nothing is going to happen about it. In my opinion it's clearly a bug (and I told them so, but without receiving any further replies).

    Moreover, I have also tried today a lot of fixed-width themes and the scaling of images is supported for only a fraction of them. So the flexible-width nature of the theme is not the problem, as I had originally assumed. This also proves support's explanation incorrect.

    The effects vary according to the HTML/CSS code of the theme. In some themes, the photo goes under the sidebar and only part of the photo is shown, in others, it goes over the sidebar. In both cases the layout is destroyed.

    Some themes that I tried and the results:

    ChaoticSoul -- does not work
    K2-Lite -- works (I chose this theme)
    Light -- does not work
    PressRow -- works
    Quentin -- does not work
    Sapphire -- does not work
    Simpla -- does not work
    The Journalist -- does not work
    Unsleepable -- does not work

    Here is how the photo galleries on my site look now, with K2-Lite:
    http://tma2.wordpress.com/photos/

    So basically I have to live with the inconvenience of a fixed-width theme, with its uneconomical use of window space and exaggerate vertical scrolling, until this problem is fixed (if ever). I'm not too happy about it...

  13. justjennifer
    Member

    Worked for me using The Journalist theme up to today. Today it no longer works. Support ticket submitted.

    There are other users using different themes reporting the same problem in the forum. I've marked all of them with the "image resize problem" tag.

    Another change I've noticed is that you can no longer insert a separate image from the Media Library into a Post where there is a Gallery. It is now automatically included in the Post's Gallery.

  14. tma2
    Member

    Maybe they are working on a fix? Yeah I wondered about TheJournalist theme since you were using it.

    We'll wait and see what happens, I guess.

  15. justjennifer
    Member

    @tma2-See this post by tellyworth on the other image resizing problem thread:
    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/image-size-in-gallery-does-not-adjust-width-anymore?replies=10#post-238205

    I hope that will resolve your issue too.

  16. panaghiotisadam
    Member

    @tma2: Thanks for the report! A couple of follow-up remarks:

    Of the fixed width themes you mention, Unsleepable behaves uniquely: it does make wide images fit - but not by scaling down, by DISTORTING them (reducing width only)!

    The behavior varies in flexible width themes, too. But there is one that works the way you want, I think: Andreas09.

    All this mess (coupled with the thread justjennifer gives above as well as this thread, were we were unable to find a working code for ordering the gallery images - and nobody from staff showed up) shows that Support should probably think better than speak of "advantages".

  17. justjennifer
    Member

    @panaghiotisadam-Which makes me wonder aloud if we shouldn't use a certain tag to flag threads such as this that absolutely cannot be handled by forum members. I'd dearly value some input by staff on that point.

    @tma2: indeed, thanks for coming back and posting the info. Much appreciated. I was remiss in not mentioning so earlier.

  18. panaghiotisadam
    Member

    @justjennifer: In theory that would be a very good idea - provided it would be used sensibly. But would it? I'm afraid of its potential abuse by very inexperienced and/or overanxious members (or by certain inhabitants of the Antarctic...). Ideally it could be a sort of privilege given only to 'senior' members.

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