I have a question about picture adornment behavior, which Mark A describes well here:
Images are inserted and displayed at ‘actual size’ (i.e. for current desktop resolution). Resizing the picture’s ‘frame’ vertically will scale the image. However, dragging the frame horizontally has no effect. But, if the frame dragged narrower (horizontally) than the image it will visibly crop it, working in from the right margin (I.e. the left side is always retained
Is it the intended behavior that one can drag the corner of the frame only vertically to scale the image, while dragging horizontally crops the image? It’s unlike any other app I’ve used which allows image manipulation. It’s also finicky: I find myself often dragging vertically to scale the image, and then horizontally just enough not to crop it.
I feel it would make more sense to always scale the image, no matter along which axis you drag the frame’s corner. As for cropping, perhaps just let the user take care of that in another app; to me this makes more sense than allowing cropping in only the horizontal direction in Tinderbox.
If you allow scaling in both directions, then the only useful resizing options are those that preserve the aspect ratio. I think that’s simply wrong.
My experience with casual photographs has been that people tend to get vertical framing about right, while they often don’t compose horizontally with much care. I could certainly be persuaded that we should crop left and right equally.
Another alternative is that, as soon as one dimension needs to be cropped, we rescale the image in the other direction – that is, we always apply uniform scaling and always fit the entire image in the adornment. In that case, should the leftover space be centered or at the right/bottom edges?
No changes, please. I’m fine with the status quo – it gives finer control than any of the options listed and is much more flexible than similar features in Graffle or Curio, for example.
My adornments are frequently screen shots (not real-world photos). I use adornment sizing to zoom to a region of the image. This would not be possible, If I understand the “always fit” suggestion correctly.
I don’t want to mess up anyone’s workflow, so I won’t try to insist that changes be made.
I will, though, share my own workflow: My adornments are also frequently screenshots … however, because I use the “save picture of selected area” screenshot command, my images are always already focused on exactly the region I need. This is why I don’t get much use out of Tinderbox’s image-cropping feature, and hence suggested leaving that out.