Thread:Unok/@comment-11842624-20141018160754/@comment-3544775-20141018185557

1) Exactly, it stores 240x240, while for me it shows them as 300x300, meaning it uscales them and images are visually with lower quality. Which may fool some users: if they see the thumb is low quality, they may think the image is too with low quality and not check it. And those 2/3/5/6/7 images don't make things better, as it results in 600x600 thumbs, which is even more bad, not only because the quality is bad, but because it takes way too much space. I see you talk about 240x240, 320x320, but you fail to understand that people with large resolutions are getting larger thumbs so that they can cover all their space. That's why I say the 240x240 thumb is getting scaled to 300x300 thumb, that 480x480 turns to 600x600 for me. I gave you screenshots in the blog thread.

2) The thing I can complement the new gallery is the less white space, but that doesn't mean it makes the gallery look better.
 * I can see they face, but I also see blurred images due to them being scaled from 240x240 to 300x300
 * "who this guy"? the idea of the image is to show the character full appearance, from head to toe, not only his face. Which makes the thumb fail to deliver the desired showcase. You don't only want to show faces... Wikia could have tried fixing the issues you mentioned "grey noise", etc, instead of creating large squares that consume more space.

No I don't see every detail in the new galleries. Like I said, the new galleries tend to crop out things, and some of those things are things you wanted to showcase. Square cropping works 2 ways: 1) if the image is widescreen it crops the center; 2) if the image is portrait it crops the top, i.e. http://www.imagebam.com/image/631478358647489 Black boxes are widescreen and portrait images; red is cropped square thumb from there. So every image that is not centered the thing it want to showcase, will be leaved out from the thumb. Images are not always perfect and not always the important part is top-centered. Examples (from other wikis):
 * 1) What are those eyes?, oh, it's this
 * 2) "Akira crushing Mitsunobu" but all I see is an ear and an arm? Oh, so the "ear" is this and the "arm" is this.
 * 3) showcasing the character hair style?, ah no it's a profile serious face pic
 * 4) again centered at his ear, simply because the face is not in the center of the image
 * 5) this is a gallery for a character named Shokichi, you can see who he is in the previous images and that he have a sting at his arms, at the thumb you only see an arm with a sting. Is that what the image wanted to show? An arm-sting? No! It wanted to show this.

I can continue giving you much more examples at how bad the cropping of squares can be. And how it can leave out the desired thing the image wanted to show. So how can that be better? In most cases were the desired pic is top-centered, it can work, but on cases like I showed (were it's left-, right-, bottom- or middle-centered), it's not working at all. That is why original shape thumb is much better than square cropped, since you can see the whole image, without the need of clicking on it. Also, the new gallery shows 12 images for a full page for me, while I can see 20 and at their original shape with the old gallery. That is much better option for me, because when I enter an image gallery I will scroll less and if a gallery have 200 images, I won't be hitting 5minutes "show more" until I see the last image. It's a matter of preference, if you like squares that crop out things and take more space, then yeah you will like the new one. But I don't like them, it ain't better, considering it show less while taking more space. Also, old gallery have option for squares, landscape, portrait and original shape. On how many places have you seen people using squares for galleries? On how many have you seen people using original shape for galleries? Suddenly with this change, the minority becomes majority and no one cares about the users preferences. Comic books tend to have a portrait/letter shape, squares cuts out the lower space, which is not always desired by specified wikis for such subject. Not always the most important thing is at the top, sometimes it's at the bottom and it will be cut out (like in the examples I gave). TV shows in this age air mostly if not only at widescreen resolutions (16:9), it's no longer 4:3, so wikis covering TV show subjects, will want their thumbs to be landscape, not squares, because again it will leave the left and right part of the image, which for some images may be the most important part (like the examples I gave). So yeah, I can say that larger squares are not better than smaller full shots. When Wikia makes changes, it should consider all the variety it haves and what the users may want for their specific subject wiki, and not labelling them under the same subject. Old gallery is much more friendly and gives you choice, the new don't give you choice, so yeah, again, the old one is better.