Image Auto-sizing & Aspect Ratio

Most Evance themes utilise auto-sizing and cropping technology to ensure that your site remains efficient to maintain and load. Nowhere is this more frequently used than within the product catalogue. Product thumbnails and even larger images can enforce set widths and heights to ensure layout consistency throughout your site. But, you may not always have the same aspect ratios in your source images. 

The cropping "Green Zone"

When auto-cropping enforces aspect ratio you may find that you lose detail off the edges of your photos. So it is important to understand how the aspect ratio of source images will be rendered on your website. In most, but not all cases you should keep a Green Zone in mind when editing photos for your website. 


When Evance auto-crops photos it keeps the source image centered and crops around it. Maintaining your subject matter within the centred Green Zone will ensure that your subject will remain within bounds for the majority of Evance themes. 

In the example above we're using an aspect ratio of 4:3, but no matter the aspect ratio of your original photos the Green Zone will be centred, usually forming a square within the center of your photo. 

Maintain Aspect Ratio

It doesn't really matter the aspect ratio of your original photos, but it will certainly help you maintain your website effectively if you maintain a consistent aspect ratio for your original product and category photos.

Original Image Sizes < 2MB

Evance will render an appropriate size for your website from your original product and category images. This means you're able to upload much larger original images than you may think. This is important as you may wish to include image zooming, or even increase or decrease image sizes on your site in the future. Maintaining larger image sizes for your original photos will mean you do not have to re-upload photos in the future should your theme dimensions change.

But, let's not get ridiculous. Digital SLR cameras today can be impressively detailed and therefore excessively large. Evance must open, resize, render and cache your images before displaying them on your site. So we recommend not to upload images larger than 2MB as this adds unnecessary strain with images sizes that may never be used. 

Closing Comments

Good photography can be the difference between good and bad sales conversions, so it is worth investing the time on your product photography and understanding photo editing software.