Low-Resolution Featured Images

On a (non-HiDPI) display, featured images are shown at a fairly low resolution (792px across). However, the theme’s content width is dynamically set (60% is the default setting).

As a result, on a typical 1920×1080 monitor, the featured image being served to the browser is merely 792px, but it’s being stretched to fill a 1216px-wide space. This results in fairly blurry photos.

You can see an example at this post. If you inspect the featured image, you’ll see that its source is https://i0.wp.com/blog.christopherscott.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/0-DSC07323.jpg?fit=792,527. The full-size image has the same URL, but without the “fit” GET parameter (i.e. https://i2.wp.com/blog.christopherscott.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/0-102A9998.jpg).

In a previous version of Decode, the theme always served up the full-size image for the featured image. That was bad, since full-sized images can be quite large and slow to load. The theme has since been updated to provide images which are far too small. Please update the theme to serve featured images in a reasonable size for non-Retina displays.

For example, the theme could default to using the Large size defined by the user (1200px in my case), or it could use a max width of content_width * 1920 (where content_width is the percentage value specified in the theme’s Customize menu).