• Registered: 2014-12-16
  • Posts: 2

Topic: Pro version needs to support the built-in CMS thumbnail scaliing

Hello, I am speaking on behalf of several sites using a mix of lite version and pro version,

It seems that even if systems such as Drupal 7 (https://www.drupal.org/project/juicebox), support any way of scaling images and thumbnails, it is overridden by-design even in the Juicebox Pro version. I have checked the documentation, and have not spotted a way to work around this without hacking the code instead of adjusting the settings.

I can confirm that it is a showstopper for several projects if not even the pro version allows us to retain the aspect ratio of thumbnails, even when we already have that function in the existing system. That is very unnecessary.

Basically we want to be able to fix the height of the thumbnails, and then let the system scale them down and provide the width automatically, in order to show the whole image in the thumbnails, not a cropped version. For several sites that is a requirement, and thus preventing more pro customers, quite unnecessary.

Why not allow for the host to take control of the scaling?

Older, similar post in the lite forum:
"Thumbnail aspect ratio"
http://juicebox.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1329

Regards,
Dzone

  • Registered: 2012-04-24
  • Posts: 5,924

Re: Pro version needs to support the built-in CMS thumbnail scaliing

This issue has been addressed and in the next version of Juicebox, thumbnail images will be scaled-to-fill the thumbWidth and thumbHeight dimensions (rather than being centre-cropped which currently happens).
If the aspect ratio of the thumbnail image does not exactly match the thumbWidth x thumbHeight aspect ratio, then there may still be a small amount of cropping (but only at the top and bottom or left and right, not in all dimensions).
If the thumbnails were scaled-to-fit (with no cropping at all) then there may be odd/uneven spaces between thumbnails (as thumbnails will still be the same size as each other with the same amount of padding between each one).

This now means that a user could potentially use a single folder of images as both the main images and thumbnails in a gallery (although I would still recommend using a dedicated, smaller set of thumbnails).

  • Registered: 2014-12-16
  • Posts: 2

Re: Pro version needs to support the built-in CMS thumbnail scaliing

Hello, thanks for the quick reply.

What we need is to be able to specify just the height, and then have the CMS software scale it down and keep its proportions/aspect ratio, which for example Drupal currently does.

We do not want the thumbnails to be square, just to share the same (custom specified) height, and then be dynamically wider or narrower.
Simply keep the aspect ratio.

Your answer does not sound like this issue has been addressed.

The need is two-fold:

a) to be able to upload unaltered originals of any and many sizes and dimensions, letting the CMS deal with auto-creation of variants. We do not want to do any manual work with images, but leave it 100% to the CMS.

b) we want the thumbnails to be a smaller version of the original, not a different version. Must be exactly the same, but scaled down.

Other competitors like Galleria (also for Drupal) does this just fine by leaving it to Drupal to serve its thumbnails automatically.
This is not even a technical challenge. It just works.

  • Registered: 2012-04-24
  • Posts: 5,924

Re: Pro version needs to support the built-in CMS thumbnail scaliing

In the next version of Juicebox, thumbnails within a gallery will still all be the same size as each other (they do not need to be square) but the images used to fill the thumbnail dimensions will be scaled-to-fill. This is certainly an improvement over the current behavior (which center-crops images) and allows for images which are nowhere near the thumbWidth and thumbHeight dimensions to be used as thumbnails, although it is not what you are looking for.

Please feel free to post suggestions for future versions in the Feature Requests thread. This keeps all the ideas together and ensures that they are not overlooked by the developers.
Thank you.