A gallery grid is square slots and the ladder is the picture's own shape, so a 480x720 portrait
arrived, object-cover cropped it to 480x480 in the browser, and a third of every file was discarded
before anyone saw it. Measured here: 108,388 bytes shipped where a 480x480 crop is 70,070.
Cropping in the browser is the right default when the shape is unknown. It is the wrong one when the
shape is known at build time, and for a carousel of square thumbnails it always is.
Thumbnail widths only — 320, 480, 640. Anything larger is a picture being looked at, and a square crop
is a loss of information that only makes sense when the slot demands it.
Centre, never sharp's `attention`. Smart cropping decides differently for every picture, so a row of
thumbnails framed by an algorithm has no common logic to it and the one it gets wrong cannot be
predicted or explained. Centre is what a photographer framing for a square already assumes.
It is a default: a placement carrying its own crop keeps the aspect file and frames it in CSS, because
that crop is a person saying which part matters. Nothing here knows about placements, and should not.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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