We introduced the justified layout on Flickr.com late in 2011. Our community of photographers loved it for its ability to efficiently display many photos at their native aspect ratio with visually pleasing, consistent whitespace, so we quickly added it to the rest of the website.

It’s been through many iterations and optimizations. From back when we were primarily on the PHP stack to our lovely new JavaScript based isomorphic stack. Last year Eric Socolofsky did a great job explaining how the algorithm works and how it fits into a larger infrastructure for Flickr specifically.

In the years following its launch, we’ve had requests from our front end colleagues in other teams across Yahoo for a reusable package that does photo (or any rectangle) presentation like this, but it’s always been too tightly coupled to our stack to separate it out and hand it over. Until now! Today we’re publishing the justified-layout algorithm wrapped in an npm module for you to use on the server, or client, in your own projects.

Install/Download

npm install justified-layout --save

Or grab it directly from Github.

Using it

It’s really easy to use. No configuration is required. Just pass in an array of aspect ratios representing the photos/boxes you’d like to lay out:

var layoutGeometry = require('justified-layout')([1.33, 1, 0.65] [, config]);

If you only have dimensions and don’t want an extra step to convert them to aspect ratios, you can pass in an array of widths and heights like this:

What it returns

The geometry data for the layout items, in the same order they’re passed in.

This is the extent of what the module provides. There’s no rendering component. It’s up to you to use this data to render boxes the way you want. Use absolute positioning, background positions, canvas, generate a static image on the backend, whatever you like! There’s a very basic implementation used on the demo and docs page.

Configuration

It’s highly likely the defaults don’t satisfy your requirements; they don’t even satisfy ours. There’s a full set of configuration options to customize the output just the way you want. My favorite is the fullWidthBreakoutRowCadence option that we use on album pages. All config options are documented on the docs and demo page.

Compatibility

Latest Chrome

Latest Safari

Latest Firefox

Latest Mobile Safari

IE 9+

Node 0.10+

The future

The justified layout algorithm is just one part of our photo list infrastructure. Following this, we’ll be open sourcing more modules for handling data, handling state, reverse layouts, appending and prepending items for pagination.

We welcome your feedback, issues and contributions on Github.

P.S. Open Source at Flickr

This is the first of quite a bit of code we have in the works for open source release. If working on open source projects appeals to you, we’re hiring!