Strategy for image sizes

Question

I run a site that has a lot of writers that generate quite a few articles a day.

I require them to provide two image sizes (one for the big headline image and one as the thumbnail). I've been wanting to change up the site layout a bit, but I am becoming limited by the image sizes for the posts.

I have considered just cropping images, but they still need to look nice, and cropping doesn't always generate what I'd want. I'd prefer to just scale down by percentage (as I do with thumbnails).

Should I just make the writers provide more images? How do other sites handle this?

Answer 1

By all means allow the writers to supply more images - they might have particular sizes they prefer, however, it would be better UX for you to resize the images for them.

Take the image they provide and then create a set of smaller images from that. Imgur does this (for example). You upload an image and it generates a filename: abc0123.jpg which is your full size image it then creates three smaller images:

abc0123l.jpg - l for large
abc0123m.jpg - m for medium
abc0123s.jpg - s for small

Which you can either use automatically or publicise to allow your users to choose which they want to use.

Answer 2

Have a look into TimThumb, it's a very popular image resize script, easily implemented in php.

Feed it the image size like so and it will generate images at virtually any size, so long as the image is good quality you can even go bigger than the source, the only limitation is the height/width ratio.

http://www.domain.uk/wp-content/themes/elementary/lib/includes/timthumb.php?src=http://www.domain.uk/wp-content/uploads/David-Ahern.jpg&w=150&h=150&zc=1&q=100&s=1"