Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

Fram (talkcontribs)

It's nice that you try to introduce new media options. Perhaps you need to think a bit more about them though before implementing them? If I add an image, it gets a default size (200px width). Now, if I have changed the size (thanks to the rather ill-advised drag-to-change dimensions option), I may end up with something I don't want. Hurrah, I can now "Set to original dimensions". Sadly, these aren't the ones you expect, but the utterly useless "maximal dimensions in Commons". So you go from standard size to this. Why is this considered to be a useful option? When will someone ever need this? Wouldn't it be a tad more useful and logical if the "original dimensions" would put this back at 200*150? Perhaps someone from the mythical QA team can indicate whether they tested and approved this, and why...

Fram (talkcontribs)

Oh, and why does the width and height indicator in the advanced settings show a different width and height (good!), but the saved code not? The saved code always goes to 200px*200px, not to 200px*150px. If you then change the height to e.g. 200px, you end up with 267px*267px. Any reason that you can't produce the same behaviour on both sides?

And of course, the "display" is terrible when you manually drag the image wider, and then reduce the size again (manually or with the dimension changer. getting some consistency in appearance, behaviour, results of actions would have been nice.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

If you look here, it appears that the "square" image size defaults to the larger of height or width, and that it displays correctly despite being "too big" in one dimension.

I don't know if there is a need to specify both dimensions. It's common to specify only the width (when a particular size needs to be specified at all), but sometimes what's common is not what's most efficient.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Bugzilla:50379 is about the need to use unspecified default sizes, and it's still open.

Looking at the commit message, it appears that "set to original dimensions" means "set to the file's original dimensions". This is consistent with the behavior that you see.

This feature would be useful for small images, like File:Notepad icon small.svg, or if you needed to know the original dimensions so that you can figure out the correct proportion. However, in the current context (i.e., without these other useful and expected features present), that button looks more like a "generally undo whatever size changes I've made", so it's behavoir will be an unpleasant surprise for some editors.

Fram (talkcontribs)

"Figure out the correct proportion"? VE doesn't let you change the proportions anyway (if you change one property, the other is automatically changed as well), so that is a useless "benefit". So the only time it could be useful would be for small images. Seems like another case where the use it could have in some cases is given more weight than the disadvantage it will have in most cases. Bad habits die hard, I suppose.

By the way, the Gerrit message you link to also claims "Maximum size is limited to the image's original maximum size.". As could be expected, no it isn't: . What is probably meant is that the "initial" size on insertion is no more than the full size of the image, but the maximum size is unlimited. Really, it is!

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

The label on the button has been changed to say "Make full size", which should be less confusing than "original size".

Mdennis (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I want to add here that on English Wikipedia Fram reiterates his opinion that this is not a very useful feature, regardless of title.

He writes, "What may be needed is "Put back default size", for when you have changed the size of the image and no longer knows what the 'original', pre-change size was, or what the size would be if you wuold insert the image anew. Hardly top priority, but useful. What we have now though is scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel-priority, when there are countless other things to do. Define position (left/right/center)? Thumb? Alt text? Change an image without deleting and readding it? All 100 times more importan than what we have gotten now." permanent diff

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Most of these features are in the pipeline (half of them are already here at MediaWiki); they just didn't make the same release cutoff as the simpler pieces.

Nnemo (talkcontribs)

When I read “Original dimensions”, I expect the original (big) dimensions of the image.

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