A photograph is rarely the shape of the slot it goes in, so something decides which part survives. It
was a centred crop and no way to change it.
Dragging the picture slides the window; the wheel zooms, anchored to the pointer so the thing under the
cursor stays under it. Both write the site's own format — `x,y,w,h` in percentages of the ORIGINAL —
which is resolution-independent and survives the file being re-encoded.
Zooming in is the window getting smaller: w and h shrink together, keeping the slot's shape. Fit is the
floor, because you cannot show more of a photograph than there is, and at exactly fit the crop is
cleared rather than written as the centred value — a null crop and a crop that happens to be centred
should not be two states.
── The preview is not object-cover ──
It draws the rectangle: the picture scaled to `100/w` of the box and offset so the chosen corner lands
at the origin. object-cover shows the largest window of the slot's shape that fits and nothing else —
it can be panned and it cannot be zoomed, so a preview built on it would silently ignore half of what
this control produces.
── Also here ──
buildSite now hands the site an av-club URL and user. That is the first piece of publishing images
cropped rather than cropping them in the browser with CSS: the plugin knows the sidecar registry, the
site knows a URL. Inert until the site uses it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
It was a read-only text box holding a path and a Browse button beside it. A path is not what anybody is
choosing — somebody picking the header photograph is choosing a PHOTOGRAPH, and reading
`ABOUT US/HEADER.jpg` to find out whether you picked the right one is doing the computer's job for it.
MediaField is the slot: empty, it is a dashed box at the page's own aspect ratio that you click or drop
onto; filled, it is the picture, with Change and Remove appearing over it on hover. The panel also stops
changing height as things are chosen, so a page with three slots starts to look like the page rather
than like a form.
── The aspect ratio is a prop and has to be ──
The header is 21:9, the product video 16:9, a gallery slot square. The component cannot know that and
must not guess: the SITE decides what shape a slot is, and a component that guessed would be a second
opinion to keep in step with the stylesheet. Both callers name the ratio their partial draws.
── Dropping ──
It accepts a drag from Officer's own file browser, which carries paths under
`application/x-officer-files` — the same payload that moves files between windows. So dragging a
photograph out of Media onto a slot is one gesture and no upload.
It does not accept a file from the desktop. That is an upload into originals/, a different operation
with its own failure modes, and the Media section already does it properly.
── Also ──
`thumbUrl` was copied into GalleriesPanel and RecordsPanel and was about to be copied a third time. It
is a module now: three copies of a URL shape is three places to be wrong about the rung when the ladder
changes, which it did four times in a day.
A file that has gone since it was chosen falls back to the empty state rather than a browser's
broken-image glyph, and says so.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5