Image grids arrange uploaded images into a masonry grid layout, which is a great way to present images in an interesting way without occupying too much visual space, like so:
While members can add grids manually, you can enable the experimental auto grid images setting to automatically apply grids to uploads of 3 or more images. Here’s how it looks to your members:
After posting, they’ll see their images neatly arranged like you see at the top of this post. This takes the burden off your members while keeping things tidy in your community posts, and makes it easier to discover features like the new image carousel, too.
Note: While this is notated as an experimental setting, we’ve been using it here on Meta and in our internal community for months, so it’s safe for your community, too!
Arrived here through the feedback link in the upcoming changes page of my admin interface because I couldn’t make sense of the description in French. Just making a note of this.
I assume that the notification stating this change will soon become permanent means that the setting - which was added specifically because auto-grid by default wasn’t the right choice for every community - will then be removed. Is that correct?
To me, it’s still as annoying as it was back then. I often upload all my screenshots at once and arrange them within my post after that. Maybe that’s because I use a tablet, and the default preview is quite small, so it’s often easier to get all the screenshots I need into the post and use the preview in Discourse to decide which one belongs to which paragraph. But I often remove the grid tags because of that. That’s why I would still prefer to disable it on my personal forum (It would also be helpful for me to disable it on Meta, but I got used to removing them here; sometimes I wish I wouldn’t have helped to identify the bug causing auto grid not to work in non-English interfaces, that was kind of a feature for me).
Even if I wasn’t using the tablet for uploading, I don’t want information from the images to be hidden by default - it’s not always obvious how much you are missing without opening the lightbox. Carousel mode doesn’t really fix that, because there is no automatic carousel mode; the result of auto grid is still the grid just like before. I know there is a toggle button in the RTE, but in Markdown mode, you need to add that syntax manually. That’s even more work than removing the grid tags.
Also, you cannot see all information in carousel mode either. It’s kind of like the smaller version of using the lightboxes from the grid. You see one full image but not all the images. If a user shares multiple photos of their build, I want to be able to follow the wiring. To do that, however, I need to be able to see both the front and back of the circuit board and the photos of the other components connected to it at the same time - not one after the other, and not just parts of the photos. That’s why I think it would be best for the forum to keep this feature disabled in the future as well.
It only works for uploaded images because if you copy and paste directly, it doesn’t work, as I think it doesn’t detect the quantity. I don’t download images just to upload them later; I find that it wastes time, especially on a mobile or tablet. That’s why, on my end, I use the grid tag and paste my images directly via copy-paste. Maybe there’s a way to make it work in grid mode by copying and pasting images. For me, the goal is to save time. It’s fine for me, but I think users aren’t using this feature because it requires too many steps.
But there’s something for everyone, and maybe quite a few people upload images, so don’t change anything for me
yea there is no way i want that auto grid function on any of my forums unless it comes with a setting. please continue to make it so we can disable it. thank you.
In this case, Stable means we’ve turned it on for most sites, but they can still opt-out and we don’t intend to force it on as the only option.
I’ll need to make a way to indicate this for certain upcoming changes, what we expect the “end state” for it to be. For now you can just ignore the warning on the upcoming change UI, we won’t move “enable auto grid images” to Permanent status, and we won’t remove the setting.
I think it might have been clearer to me if the impact type had been “setting default.” I guess then it’s more obvious that it is still a setting at the end.
This impact type/upcoming changes for site setting defaults was only merged the other day whereas this image grid one was made before we had that functionality and it was a migrated “legacy” experimental site setting.
We discussed, and in future any of these setting default upcoming changes will not show this warning on Stable, nor be included in the admin problem checks for Stable upcoming changes that have been disabled.
