Use larger profile photos

[dracos]

My comment on https://github.com/mysociety/theyworkforyou/issues/1278#issuecomment-321610275 - these new photos, and others we get elsewhere, are larger/higher quality, and it would be good if we could adapt/use them in some way. Currently I believe the site uses (due to historic accretion), and I didn't check mobile widths:

• MP page: 60px wide
• List page: 45px wide
• Debate page: 50px wide
• Search page: 2.5em wide.

[MyfanwyNixon]

Just to note in case it adds impetus to prioritise: a charity who uses our images to populate a campaigning tool is very keen that we should use higher-res pics; they've been pointed at the parliamentary source, but presumably they're keen to avoid (or maybe don't know) what programming resource it would take them to switch.

[ajparsons]

The https://github.com/mysociety/theyworkforyou/tree/new-big-mp-images branch contains two new folders containing slightly larger versions of the official portraits (260*346) and similarly (but varying) sized versions of portraits pulled from wikipedia. This in many cases can replace the existing small version of what seems to be the same file, but the original is still missing in some cases.

There are big images (newly sourced) for 3,511
There are small images (old) for 2,516
Small but not big: 777

The minimal action at this point is to amend the script to resize these images to the mpsL size (120 x 160) and these will replace the small images where absent.

More complicated options:

1. Amend files to a different size to help conform some of the above.
2. Upgrade the remaining small files to the large size by adding the blurred border directly to the image and avoid future CSS troubles.

@zarino : any opinions?

[ajparsons]

Hopefully addressed in https://github.com/mysociety/theyworkforyou/pull/1550

[ajparsons]

Following discussion in https://github.com/mysociety/theyworkforyou/pull/1550, I have moved the images (and sourcing script) into a separate repo: https://github.com/mysociety/twfy_representative_portraits

This will need to be deployed on the same server as TWFY. This should improve the long term management of updating images.

[ajparsons]

@sagepe : Sorry meant to tag you in this one. Needs some thought on the best way to integrated this (served separately, or latest images pulled in on deploy?)

[sagepe]

Sorry if the answer to this is obvious (I'm not really familiar with this particular bit of the system) but my first question is: why do we need to store the images in git at all? Why not just store the scripts used to obtain/manage them instead? We can ensure our copies are stored redundantly and backed-up.

[ajparsons]

It's a good question! I think broadly because we may want to put additional custom images in that aren't always the result of a script. I've tried to make it more script-based, but I think we'll want to keep the flexibility to be able to add/remove images.

There's nothing saying though we couldn't have a script to pull it from this repo as an external source though.

[sagepe]

So I think this is done?

[dracos]

Yes, although the original point of the site using the images at a wide variety of different sizes for unknown reasons still applies.