Dave’s Photo Blog

I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. Web.com has put up a long-awaited upgrade to the site builder and it appears to contain a fatal flaw for the way I use it. It’s about pictures. I don’t think it has fully set in, but the reality is that I may be forced to move the entire site somewhere else in a real hurry.

OK, so take a look at this wonderful diptych:

I’ve been long in writing, I know, but I had an interesting one here and some other stuff lined up behind it. This was a photo experiment in perspective with the same shot from two different, but close, shooting locations. But the problem with the new site builder is that when you insert an image, it shows up by default as a tiny little box (not to mention taking noticeably longer for the upload) about the size of four squares of text, you know, like this:

Oh, except that it’s just white, not the actual image squished (as is the image above). And it has drag-handles on the outside corners so you can just click and hold one and resize the image. That might seem OK, but there are two huge problems.

First, there is no way to lock the aspect ratio. When you drag a corner out you change the shape of the image unless you happen to drag the mouse exactly on a perfect angle. This introduces quadrilateral skew in the resulting photograph. But that doesn’t make it a skew quadrilateral (couldn’t resist a little one-liner for geometry wonks, now, could I?). Oh, it’s a mess. Look at where I’ve gotten to here? And you know, I tried every double-key combination I could think of. Click and drag but press the shift key. Click and drag but press the Alt key. There wasn’t any combination I could find that locked the ratio to preserve the shape of the photo.

And secondly, the image starts out as this tiny, maybe 16×16 box and then you drag it out to the size you want. That probably means that even if you ended up selecting exactly, say, 600×400 when you released the drag-handle the image would be transformed from what was uploaded.

To demonstrate this point, this is the best I can get resizing the stretched photograph above by hand to about the original size.

Oh, why not, since I’m writing. The photo on the right was taken from 10 feet behind, 15 feet to the right and 4 feet up from the photo on the left. I took these shots in Dugger Park in Medford, so the four feet was a bright red and blue kindof three year old play structure. Anything for my devoted audience. Anyway, when I was up there I realized that without the opposing bank the sign was more isolated and I wanted to look at the perspective change side-by-side. My summary: sign in isolation has no message, just means junk next to water. Sign with opposing bank leaves open to broad interpretation why the sign is disused, what it warned of, etc. I don’t particularly care what the sign means in the right hand shot. Oh, I also like the framing of the sign better on the left, but your opinion may vary.

Back to Web.com, though. There is a really nice new rich text editor, so I can cut and paste this image, go to full screen mode, drag the handles around and stuff. That part is cool and I abused it severely in this posting to make a point: I don’t want to mess with my photos, folks. This one in particular. I assembled this one in Photoshop to specific dimensions. A 10 pixel boundary with two 400 x 600 photos. Everything exact. And now, not.

This really might be a fatal issue for me. There is a workaround, I suppose, that is going into the page HTML and seeing if I can fix the image reference there, but I just can’t bear that kind of repetitive thing for every photo I want to post, even if it is infrequent as of late.