I was recently tasked to improve the look and functionality of a site that lets users upload images. One of the area I looked into was how it handled automatic thumbnail generation, because I found the thumbnails that were being generated to be, well, plain ugly.
The method they used was a standard resize to max width and height. The uploaded photo is scaled down proportionately to fit into a box of specified width and height. This resulted in irregularly sized thumbnails and even more so when users upload photos with strange dimensions. Not only does it make the page look messy and disorganized, Continue reading