Using the featured image for all views

  • Anonymous

    #10200

    Is it possible to use the featured image all the time? So not only for posts itself but also for posts listings regardless of the number of columns used.

    Reason for asking this is the difference in image quality between for example 2 or 4 columns or the images used for blog and category pages.

    A few examples:

    Using Franz Josef Stack: Posts with 4 columns, the standard 300×159 size is used, which doesn’t look good either on a PC or using a mobile phone. Changing the media middle size to a larger size “solves” that, but is not really a solution.

    Using Franz Josef Stack: Posts with 2 columns, the standard 600×300 size is used.

    Category pages also use 2 columns but use the featured image size itself as do posts and pages.

    The slider uses the featured image size itself.

    All these different sizes used for different purposes do not make sense to me. The standard featured image size is 850×450 as stated under Size and Dimensions. Why not use that same image everywhere and change width and height with css?.

    I understand that loading a 300×159 or 600×300 image goes faster but since some featured images are already loaded through the slider for example, why not use it for all images?.

    It’s a lot less hassle then figuring out how to make the images look good when using different column numbers.

    Would it be possible to make this an option somehow?

    Admin

    Syahir Hakim

    #45612
    Quote:
    All these different sizes used for different purposes do not make sense to me. The standard featured image size is 850×450 as stated under Size and Dimensions. Why not use that same image everywhere and change width and height with css?.

    I understand that loading a 300×159 or 600×300 image goes faster but since some featured images are already loaded through the slider for example, why not use it for all images?.

    That is really the primary reason for using the different image sizes – to optimise the page loading speed. In fact, this is one of the major recommendations by Google when you use their Pagespeed assessment tool.

    The slider is meant to use an image that is a lot larger than is used anywhere else. A typical size of the slider’s image is about 100KB, which is really inefficient for all other uses. Additionally, the slider typically contain only a few posts (making it slides through a lot of posts really defeats the purpose of the slider), so most of the images in the posts listing are not yet loaded.

    If you simply need to adjust which portion of the image is cropped, you can use a plugin to manually crop the images for the smaller size. That will give you the more granular control that you need over how your images are cropped into the different sizes.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/manual-image-crop/

    Anonymous

    #45613

    I understand from a developer point of view, why the different images sizes are used and that FJ is build up that way especially in regard to PageSpeed Insights scores.

    But the 4 column image size used (300×159) for example, just doesn’t look good, neither on desktop nor mobile.

    I “fixed” it by setting Media Settings -> Medium Size to a 850 width. This makes the theme always use an 850 width version of an image but since the 850 width version is already there, i thought maybe there is a different way to achieve that. The disadvantage of using this “fix” namely, is that two versions of 850 are used, one in columns (Medium Size version) and one in posts or pages (original 850 uploaded version).

    Since I use the Featured Image not only for the slider but also for banners etc., most of them are loaded already anyway and by using htaccess leverage browser caching, loading is already reduced.

    The cropping problem described in my other post (600×300 that should be 600×318) can be fixed the same way by setting Media Settings -> Medium Size to 600 with. So an extra plugin is not needed.

    I just thought all this can be solved by using the Featured Image all the time. No more cropping problems or images not looking good. When it would be an option somehow, you can always decided not to use it and FJ would be PageSpeed Insights “safe” again.

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