SharePoint pages and image editing updates in Office 365

thanks Beth Hall and KevinCrossman .

kudos Beth Hall on putting together that page documenting your test results and your thinking on this.

I have a technical background , though not in design , so this was useful for me. As per your advice i'll probably need to run the tests myself to fully appreciate the full picture (pun intended :smileyhappy:)

I think most SharePoint business users could struggle with grasping this OOTB functionality around Image management in SharePoint and could potentially stop them from using SharePoint as a Comms tool... Creating a newsletter in Word and/or Outlook and emailing it may seem a more attractive option. Or perhaps using Yammer or Teams , where the rollup/aggregation experience is functional but not as rich (but doesn't need to be either)

Do competing products for OOTB Comm sites (I'm guessing WordPress could be one of these) have the same issues/gotchas in relation to simple image editing and responsiveness issues? 

Does Microsoft envision investment in making the image editing experience within Modern sites more usable and easy to understand?

Wondering do the SharePoint "Intranet in a box" products also suffer from this limitations. i.e. the inability to resize images within the page editor and the issues listed in Beth Hall 's article in relation to how images behave in responsive/adaptive scenarios.

100% Agreed on the pointer to avoid using Text in the images. 

Another tip to add to the list on http://straightenthemaze.com/2018/02/21/how-sharepoint-handles-images/ could be to avoid using pictures of people as images that will be displayed in any aggregation/roll-up web parts. What I've seen.. similar to how Text is handled , the aggregation/rollup may display people with their heads cropped out of the photograph which doesn't look good.

Thankfully It's ok to have pictures with people within the contents of the page.

[Update - 15022019] I've had a re-read of Beth's post (see URL above). I've distilled my experience with this to one recommendation. When working with images in SharePoint pages.  If the images are photographs taken on a smartphone then the (phone) photographer should be using landscape mode rather than portrait mode.

Images that can be displayed in 16:9 aspect ratio (i.e. think of this as the display on a laptop or monitor) will behave/look well in the SharePoint page experience. Images that were taken in portrait mode do not behave/look well.

There still is a question here in relation to how best to display a screenshot from a mobile app (e.g. the SharePoint App) as an image on a modern  SharePoint page.  This is where improved ability to resize the images would come in handy (similar to how we can resize the image in e.g. Outlook or Word - by dragging in the corners)

KevinCrossmanYes, you are correct, it focuses on web parts that display a page's thumbnails.

You bring up a good point.  When I do update the article, I'll explore page content images as well.

Beth Hall That article is interesting as it relates to the image that's used for News Page thumbnails. I was referring to image placed onto the page using the Image Web Part (e.g. images that aren't part of the header)

Colm Counihan KevinCrossman 

Prior to the in-system image editing features being introduced, SharePoint's preferred image dimension was 16:9.  Proportions other than that were scaled or had white space added to get them to 16:9. 

The behavior was inconsistent based on the web part type, web part display view, column scale and page scale.  The image proportions that were distorted the most were square.  The more you deviated from the 16:9 proportion, the worse the distortion got.

I wrote a very detailed blog article that includes examples, which may be helpful.  It includes a handful of high-level "Rules" to keep images looking good.

While I haven't explored the impact of the new in-system editing functionality in depth, my assumption is that regardless of where an image is edited (in-system or prior to uploading) the display behavior will be the same.

At some point when I have some time, I'll dive into a full exploration using the in-system editing features and update the article.  In the mean-time, I hope this info helps.

Cheers

Agree that lack of resizing, like Wiki pages have, is definitely a pain point.  Now that it's been pointed out, I do find it odd that cropping and aspect ratio changing are available, but resizing isn't.

I'd like to be able to do simple resizing of the images within the page editor. 

I've taken screenshots from my mobile , I uploaded them to OneDrive, copied them to SharePoint and then added them to the page. The images on the displayed on the page actually are are actually larger (considerably) than my mobile handset. 

I'm working on a 15inch laptop , and the primary experience for the page will be that which is displayed on a device with a similar screen size. however the mobile screenshot does not appear entirely on one screen. It scrolls across 1.5 pages at least. 

I'd like to have more control over how the images display on the page. i seem to be able to crop the image but that is not what I want to do for a screenshot.

The aspect ratio options don't seem to be working for me either. 

Any suggestions ? or do I need to shrink the original screenshot images outside of SharePoint before adding them to a page. I note that when I open the images in "photos" the image display is about 70% of the size when I add it to the SharePoint page. So part of my issue is that SharePoint is deciding to enlarge the images.

Perhaps this is because i am selecting to display the image in a single section.. and this relates to "sections" on the page rather than the images.. However it doesn't make sense to me to arrange the page in a different way other than:

1) text about the image to follow

2)image

3) text about the next image to follow etc.

The phrase "a picture tells a thousand words" could be appropriate here..  If I select a 2 column  design with the image and the text, i end up with the image and then a small amount of text in the column alongside. The text column has way too much whitespace.. because the picture is telling the "1000 words" i don't need to supply the text that would fill the column alongside the article.

[edit] I see there is a user voice for this already .. https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/20390116-ability-to-resize-images-on-modern-pages

Debjani Mitra ,  please disregard my post - the issue is no longer there.  Perhaps I caught it in  bad time :-( 

I will edit my previous post - to remove the false alarm about a bug. 

Social bar has been deployed to our tenant. Everything works great. 

The only suggestion I have: It wold be great if the icons on the social bar would have pop-up explanations ( i.e. with mouse over) . For example I was bombarded with question about Views as to what period it covers. So pop-up could just explain the meaning of the icons.