User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Design your own photo galleries/@comment-1066636-20100719190038

@ Kirkburn

I haven't said 120px would be more suitable in many cases; it seems you misunderstood me there. I said that letting wikis specify a default width for their galleries (whatever that may be according to their needs) would be preferable to having to manually edit the image width for each gallery. Just like you said that 120px is an arbitrary number, 200px is as well and doesn't suit everyone.

I do think height restrictions are necessary though; while you are right that galleries are about showing images, I don't think that they should take up the majority of an article's size. In the example I linked, the galleries made up maybe 25% of the article previously, now they take up more than 60%.

Especially galleries with portrait-style images waste a lot of space now, just take a look at the "Fallout 3" section of that gallery: a whole screen used for displaying a grand total of 5 images. If I want to fix that, I have to manually fiddle with the widths until it's no longer that bad, and repeat that for every single gallery I create. Previously I could simply specify the images and be done with creating the gallery. Sorry, that just doesn't seem user-friendly to me.

Regarding wasting space on the boxes around the images, you have exchanged that for creating even more whitespace around the boxes, especially in galleries with mixed image orientations and sizes. I don't see how that's any better, to be honest. It just looks messy.