User blog comment:Ieatrice/New Image Galleries Available in Labs/@comment-961279-20141103060940

I don't think this has been mentioned before, but I noticed that the size of the pictures in the new gallery will shrink or enlarge themselves to fit the width of the browser window. So if you've got small pictures and a few pictures in a gallery (looks like less than four), they may get enlarged beyond 100% to fill the available space. With the current galleries, the pictures stay their original size and will move to a new line if the browser gets too narrow.

If you've got a mix of portrait and landscape pictures in a standard gallery, there's a lot of whitespace in between each picture horizontally and vertically, and you really can't get around that unless you put the portrait pictures next to each other, the landscape pictures next to each other and lock it down to a fixed width like in a table. In these situations, the new gallery works really well because it does make the pictures uniform in size and reduces the whitespace to almost nothing.

The drawback is that you do lose the benefit of widescreen pictures. We're kind of past the point where directors had to shoot movies or TV shows so that the important stuff was never on the sides because they knew it wouldn't be seen when it was cropped to be shown on a 4:3 standard definition TV. Now, the 16:9 format is standard and everyone pretty much expects pictures to be widescreen because their computer monitors and TVs have those dimensions.

Since access to the gallery pages on the Phineas and Ferb Wiki are typically done through a template that auto-generates the link, I thought it could be modified to provide a second link with the new gallery flag at the end. That way, people could view the galleries in whichever of the two modes they like best. But I just tried it out and adding the ?gallery=new command at the end of the link results in a redlink because it thinks the page hasn't been created.

This is something I will have to bring up for our community to discuss. We kind of pride ourselves on having widescreen pictures and we use a slideshow on the main page for the pictures they vote on every month. If I read the help page right, we'd lose that slideshow, which means redesigning the main page a little bit. It's been several years since we did that, so it might not be a bad thing if a majority of the users wanted the new galleries.