The discussion is about making it more obvious that an image is resizable when uploading it. sam reported an issue where the resize controls are not immediately visible on hover and proposed two solutions: fixing the bug or displaying the controls unconditionally.
sam, danekhollas, and Johani agreed that displaying the controls unconditionally would increase discoverability and improve the user experience, especially on mobile devices. Johani also pointed out that the current implementation uses opacity to hide the controls, which still occupies space, and suggested restyling the controls to make them look nicer.
awesomerobot mentioned that the original reason for not displaying the controls unconditionally was due to flickering issues, but sam reported that removing the opacity did not cause flickering. awesomerobot attributed this to a debounce added at some point.
However, chapoi disagreed with the proposed change, finding it made the interface busier and questioning the need for improved discoverability.
I see no harm in showing the resizing controls in the preview unconditionally for three reasons:
The first is that we only “hide” them with opacity
which means they still occupy some space even when they’re invisible. The wrapper is absolutely positioned, but we add some padding to .image-wrapper
The second is that the feature would then work on mobile as well, which it currently doesn’t for me even though it’s supposed to work
The third is that it would increase the discoverability of the feature.
Short of that, what we can do is make it so that the controls for all images are visible when you hover the preview panel, not individual images. As well as fix the issue on mobile (which might only be limited to my devices)
If we make the controls unconditionally visible, we can also spend a bit of time on making them look nicer.
Yeah I’d prefer these to be always visible and an overlay on top of the image so the spacing doesn’t appear to be larger in the composer vs the actual post.
One reason why we didn’t originally do this is because you’d see the controls flicker terribly as you typed. I think there were some changes made that reduced the flicker, but the controls are still removed from the DOM entirely once you start typing… once that gets sorted out absolutely go ahead and restyle them so they’re always appearing @johani!
But I still feel the meat here is that the issue is not properly discoverable and depends on hover.
@Johani maybe do a theme component for styling this now (since you can do pure CSS to get whatever you want) be sure to test this on a very very short image. Then install the component on dev and meta so we can live with it for a bit and decide if we prefer this or not?
I’m actually not in favour at all of this change personally. It makes it so much more busier. Was there any actual issue with discoverability of resizing?
