New mobile home pages & better control of image cropping
Your home page now looks better-than-ever on mobile devices, thanks to a few new features we just released this week.
Larger images that fill the screen
One challenge for us has always been to display large full-screen images (usually meant for landscape-oriented desktop monitor display) on small portrait-oriented devices.
The obvious and least-exciting solution was to scale images down to the device’s width, so no prominent part of the image was cropped out. This often created lots of negative space both above and below the image and left the page looking empty.
Now, mobile home pages display images much larger, filling almost the entire screen, while never cropping your subject out of the photo, due to the new focal point feature explained below.
Focal Points
Displaying photos across multiple devices, each with different sizes and wildly-different aspect ratios, creates lots of opportunity for unfavorable cropping.
If you’ve ever uploaded an image with its subject close to the edge of the frame, then resized your browser window, you may have noticed that sometimes the important part of the image can get cut off.
Our new focal point feature fixes this, by allowing you to manually choose your home page images’ focal points, ensuring that when (and only when) your images have to be cropped, it’s done so in a way that preserves their integrity.
Slideshows
Mobile home pages also now respect your slideshow settings and will display your images in large, silky-smooth (hardware-accelerated) slideshows, should you enable that option in your control panel.
Originally, the decision to omit slideshows from mobile sites was due to the limited connection speeds of most mobile devices. Slideshows used to severely slow page loads speeds, hurting the overall experience of that first impression many people with have with your brand.
But, due to both our recent responsive dynamic-resolution image delivery system (which ensures only images that are perfectly-sized to the viewer’s screen and resolution are downloaded), and improvements to modern cell networks, the time-cost of displaying a slideshow is negligible or totally unnoticeable.