Discussion: Photo cropping plan in the group feeds

[andrewxhill]

Here are 3 reference examples.

1. FB style feed, with cropping. No full-image because the user is forced to conform. Opinion here: it's not about sharing your photos, it's about their interface/application so it's their rules.
2. iMessage style feed, without cropping. Here you share the full image. Here, the image isn't cropped, but you can also still click it for full-screen view.
3. Slack-mobile style feed, with cropping. Here you share the full image, it gets cropped to square, you click the square to see the full image (matching our current UI).

I personally think they all work really well, but are based a lot on the UI/UX that surrounds them.

• I like a lot the Slack multi-photo share when it's 4 or less photos (just moving the grid about; you could imagine 5+ photos then collapsing into a clickable album with preview).
• I don't like at all the iMessage multi-photo share where it just lumps them on top of each other.
• FB I'm not sure, i guess they just have the single photo with the ability in full screen mode to pan left or right, which is pretty limiting imo

[andrewxhill]

I like the crop, and looking at the way slack does it, it buys us a lot of freedom to do other things with more photos

[sanderpick]

Those are not all examples of similar products. Each works well because they are heavily designed for specific and different user experience. So, we just have to choose which one we're going after, and then implement those design choices. No need to re-invent the wheel.

Social, focused on showcasing content

IG is the obvious example here. In the past I've used IG a lot. One of the nicest enhancements they made was going from square to more aspect ratios. This gives you a chance to showcase the photo you want, as you made it, in the feed. Most people are just scrolling, and only stop to look closely if what they saw was intriguing. A short and wide photo is not the same as a tall portrait shot, and if it was presented that way, it would look terrible. This type of feed caters well to photographers, product photos / advertising. It's worth noting that IG has always let the user choose the crop, regardless of the ratio. Other cases of apps auto-choosing the crop go to great lengths to smartly ensure faces and other focal points are as centered as possible. This is important for content showcasing.

Messaging, focused on communication

iMessage and Slack are good examples. The experience here is not really a content feed, but a conversation thread. As you noted, Slack crops on mobile, but they don't on desktop. iMessage pulls it off very well by showing pending thumbnails w/ aspect ratio in the composition box and in the rendered thread. However, the bottom line here is that you can actually pay less attention to the showcasing and more to the flow of conversation, which is probably why Slack discards the aspect ratio in favor of packing more onto the smaller mobile screen.

We should decide if we're a content feed or a conversation thread, and then from there talk about how to optimize the chosen experience.

My vote: It would be cool to have both! But the current Photo app's Groups are clearly conversation threads. A content feed would be cool if we allowed users to discover public feeds with the intention of showcasing some content (photography albums, blogs, stores, etc.).