When redesigning Architizer from the ground up we focused on designing a fully responsive site that would give users the same experience on all devices. This raised some tricky issues when it came to image aspect ratios. Architects were uploading both portrait and landscape images, not to mention extreme aspect ratios.

The images themselves all had unique compositions that required seeing a specific portion of the picture to really understand the space. Cropping images would be messy and very time consuming, it would also mean that all of our images would be constrained to specific proportions when the page gets resized.

This was a big issue. We had introduced full width images at the top of almost all of our pages, allowing the users to highlight a cover photo. As you can see in this article, Medium has implemented a similar feature. The issue with what Medium has done is that as the author, I can not select what portion of my image is showing. If my image were vertical and I wanted you to see the bottom, I would have to crop the image before hand. Although this doesn't seem like a large request for one image, it quickly escalates when you are uploading 20 images. Not to mention, architects are not willing to create custom media for each place they present their work.