Rp31

Image sizes in articles

Hi Rp31 and welcome to Wikipedia. I notice that your edits to Wadham College, Oxford include hard-coding the widths of some images. Except in special cases (e.g. in infoboxes and panoramas) it is best practice not to force images to pixel sizes, because this overrides the thumbnail size logged-in users can set in their preferences. The advice is In general, do not define the size of an image unless there is a good reason to do so: some users have small screens or need to configure their systems to display large text; "forced" large thumbnails can leave little width for text, making reading difficult. In addition, forcing a "larger" image size at say 260px will actually make it smaller for those with a larger size set as preference, so the use of upright with a scaling factor is preferred wherever sensible. Where you need control over the relative size of images, use the "upright" parameter, e.g. upright=1.0 is the same as the user's thumbnail setting. Where an image is "portrait" (i.e. taller than it is wide) using "upright" without a value will shrink the image slightly in proportion to the usual width. I've put some example below. If you've no objection, I will remove the explicit widths from the Wadham article in a few days. If you'd like to discuss this, please reply here. Thanks and happy editing - Pointillist (talk) 22:11, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi Pointillist,

Thank you so much for the comments - this is indeed very useful to know! I will try to fix the issues with the images as you suggested, but in case you feel that it's still not quite correct please do feel free to make changes as well.

Thanks again for taking the time to explain this! Rp31 (talk) 17:16, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Dear Rp31, great work but but I don't think I have explained properly. It's great because you've obviously implemented the "relative vs absolute" idea thoroughly. But the result is still that the user preferences are being overridden, for every image in the article body:

Statues of the founders (Image:Nicholasanddoothywadham.jpg) upright=0.9

Front quad (Image:Wadh3.jpg) upright=1.55

College entrance on Parks Road (Image:Wadham College.jpg) upright=1.10

Front quad (File:Wadham College Front Quad October 2009.jpg) upright=1.35

Uncaptioned File:Wadh.jpg upright=1.35

Hall (Image:Wadham 4.jpg) upright=1.35

Chapel (Image:Wadham College Chapel, Oxford - Diliff.jpg) upright=1.35

Holywell Music Room (File:Holywell Music Room.jpg) upright=1.35

Bowra Building (File:Wadh10.jpg) upright=1.35

Holywell Quad (Image:holywell quad.jpg) upright=1.35

Roger Penrose File:Roger Penrose-6Nov2005.jpg 250px

This can't be right. If you're overriding other readers' preferred sizes for the majority of images, surely you should be changing your own preference. What I suggest is that you increase the Thumbnail size in your preferences and then check the article out. - Pointillist (talk) 22:29, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Oh, I see what you mean Pointillist. I've removed the upright and 250px commands, and just left three upright commands on the images that work better if slightly larger than the nearby images. Thanks for explaining also the 'your preferences' settings - that's a cool feature I didn't know about. Rp31 (talk) 11:52, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

I've had a go with the article myself now. I think one problem is that there were too many pictures. I've removed one of the Front quad shots, which helps, and I've re-arranged the images so the back quad appears later in the article. This helps keep the named images closer to their sections (Hall pic to Hall section etc). I've also photoshopped the original images of the Parks Road entrance and the Holywell Music room to fix the perspective etc. From the content point of view, the quality of the citations needs to be improved, e.g. instead of getting the college history from www.wadham.ox.ac.uk., perhaps a book by an established author/publisher could be found? Anyway, I'll sign off now (and I'll remove those examples I posted a few days ago). Merry Christmas - Pointillist (talk) 14:29, 23 December 2013 (UTC)