dumb question about thumbnail sizes on desktop

howdy

Great theme that I love, and pardon me if this is off topic and lenghty. I am very confused by the thumbnail sizes you chose, versus what’s in style.css. WP blogs and theme makes like Astra all advise the featured images to be 1200px width, and since both facebook and twitter want 1.92 ratio, that makes them 1200×624 (or sometimes 628).

Now, this theme creates those custom sizes:

• slider-full: 1280×720 (ratio 1.87) and it actually creates larger thumbnails then originals
• featured: 1024 width, used in singular as a header
• medium: 720×380, used nowhere

Lastly, the content wrapper is 70%-30% for primary-secondary, with total width of 1300px. Minus the left and center paddings, that give the full width images a very nice and round value of 879px. I mean, seriously?

I am very, very confused. the visual quality of images is very low overall, because none of the thumbnail sizes created are used anywhere. They are either too resized large or too small, and the browser has to resize them 100% of the time. I will alter the syle.css and change the break points, and all the custom sizes, not to worry. That’s not the reason why I writting this post.

It bugs me so much, that I want to know, what went into consideration when you designed this theme? 1300px total width makes sense for many reasons, but why didn’t you come up with a way to have an even number (preferably multiple of 16) for the primary container usable width? Who creates pictures of 879px width?

Single pages and posts:

Modern monitors are wider then SVGA. My audience and yours certainly, report thoses sizes in 2024:

Put the tablets and phones aside, you can see that most screens are wider then 1300px. When full screen, Chromium and Edge lose 19px and 25px respectively, givine a usable browser width of 1341px at least, on small laptops (commonly WXGA). On wider desktop screens, users tend to not have the browser full screen, and 1300px content width will certainly fit 99% of use cases.

Therefore, what prevents the theme from setting a hard maximum for the primary content, multiple of 16? Before the invention of webp and avif, jpeg was the standard. That’s why I mention 16, size of the most common subsampling (2 times 8px). 879px is not a multiple of 16. 880 is, and that’s what should be used.

Front page:

• the slider is 395px high, width does not matter. No thumbnails have that size.
• the trending tabs have 90x90px squares on Edge, 102x90px on Chromium. No thumbnails have that size.
• featured story have 100x100px squares on Edge, 102x100px on chromium. No thumbnails have that height.
• archive list have featured resized to 635x330px, with hard coded style of 640×333. No thumbnails have that size.
• latest and did you miss stories: 180px high. No thumbnails have that height.

Smallest sizes are not even consistent on Edge. At least Firefox agrees with Chromium.

What should be done, I don’t know yet. Resizing all the custom sizes in functions.php, that’s for sure. And then tweaking the css to makes sure the square thumbnails all agree on their size. etc etc. Still brainstorming it. Do you get why I am so confused? If you don’t have time to discuss this I would understand. Sorry for my OCD, and thank you.

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]