by Andy

The photo that shrank by itself

It looked right, and a second later it shrank and a grey frame appeared around it.

It was us. 54 injects a fix so a photo is not shown cropped, and that fix applied to every photo: the ones in a grid too.

Inside a card, showing the whole photo without changing the box can only be done one way: by shrinking it. What is left over turns grey. The fix was uglier than the problem.

What changed

The whole photo is shown only when you OPEN it: the modal, the viewer, the opened note. There the box adapts and nothing turns grey. In a card, the site design decides, because it is the one that knows what shape that grid has.

The lesson is uncomfortable and holds for any automatic fix: one that applies everywhere is easier to write and harder to live with.

And what found it was not a screenshot: it was a bench that compares each photo’s natural ratio against the one being painted. A screenshot is for looking at; it does not turn red.

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