Turning off auto-grid-images?

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

Is there a way to turn off “auto grid images”?

re:

DEV: Auto grid images no longer experimental (#29572)

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

Or a way to change the number of images attached before it auto grids them?

I can’t seem to find anything relating to this setting in the admin control panel.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

I really really really want to get a setting to turn this off. And I’m not alone, because every active users of mine dislike big time grid/masonry view.

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

The MIN_IMAGES_TO_AUTO_GRID variable is in /app/assets/javascripts/discourse/app/lib/uppy/composer-upload.js

const MIN_IMAGES_TO_AUTO_GRID = 3;
if (this.#consecutiveImages?.length >= MIN_IMAGES_TO_AUTO_GRID) {
    this.#autoGridImages();
}

I suspect that because the MIN_IMAGES_TO_AUTO_GRID number is hard coded, there is no way for us to change this value?

Three is a very low number to auto-implement this

[lindsey (Lindsey Fogle)]

There’s currently no setting to disable or change how auto-gridding works. It’d be helpful for us to understand your concerns or problems with how this feature works today so that we can determine the best path forward.

If you’d like to see changes to how this works now, could you please share some more details about what’s not working well today and how that’s causing problems for you or your community?

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

It looks bad? That is really valid reason.

This is from iPhone 15+, not the narrowest one, but not too wide either.

Users just don’t want to see such buch of images, specially when those would have different aspect ratios. Theirs mobiles are capable of to show images right one after one.

We have an option to not use automatic lists. But now I have to teach to users, who are already scared of Discourse editor and for them strange looking markings, how to edit [grid] away.

And that’s why we need one setting more or this should be an component. This time improvement wasn`t an improvement, sorry.

[Don]

Hello

I also would like to ask to keep it behind a site setting. I like it but the way it works not really. I mean with adding the [grid][/grid] tags, people can easily break the images grid view. I understand why this is important, but we just don’t have enough time to fix these broken grid galleries after non-tech users all the time. We would like to keep it simple as possible.

Plus this only works if the images are uploaded at the same time. If they are uploaded one after the other, it will not detect this and will not automatically insert the grid view.

We have been using the Masonry Image Gallery theme component for a long time which is automatically makes it without using tags.

I would like much more the core version but unfortunately that is less user friendly yet.

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

Thanks Lindsey

@lindsey

It’d be helpful for us to understand your concerns or problems

Our community is a very heavy user of photographs, with over half a million images on our Discourse now.

One of the problems we face with auto-grid being automatically applied is that 99% of our users don’t know what it is, that it is being applied, nor how to remove it.

Why might this be an issue?

~96% of the photos our community shares are landscape in orientation, not portrait.

Auto-gridding crops the images a user uploads rather dramatically, chopping the edges off and turning landscape photos in to portrait photos to the naked eye

One community member even accused us of modifying their photos.

There is perhaps some irony in my landscape screen shots that I just uploaded now not being landscape

Our fear is that we are just several days in to this new feature, I can’t imagine what the coming weeks and months will be like

[lindsey (Lindsey Fogle)]

Thanks for all the feedback shared here so far — we’ll chat about this internally and I’ll report back!

In the meantime, please feel free to continue to share insights on how this is working out (or not!) in your community.

[sparkyws]

I like it, ive been using the grid function for sometime

[piffy]

This seems like a very obvious thing to have in the settings. I’ve recently updated my site without knowing this was pushed and after one day I’ve already seen the [grid] text show up in posts because people don’t have the technical understanding of what it’s doing or what it means. I’ve also received a complaint that it’s automatic.

The grid in our toolbar is Masonry Image Gallery, which I think works better generally because it doesn’t crop the image (but there are a few cases where [grid] is preferred). So having [grid] show up now is confusing.

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

@piffy

I’ve already seen the [grid] text show up in posts

You get these appearing randomly too?

[piffy]

Yep, exactly

[Don]

Yeah, these kind of things I’m talking about here:

@Don

people can easily break the images grid view. I understand why this is important, but we just don’t have enough time to fix these broken grid galleries after non-tech users all the time.

[tobiaseigen]

I have some feedback to share here too.

I spent the day yesterday in the garden pruning my plants, and took some before/after photos on my phone and uploaded them to topics on my personal forum. I then went back to the computer periodically to clean up the posts and add more notes. Sometimes I also used the mic to dictate, which also worked remarkably well.

1. I’d prefer it if all photos were in a grid by default, even if there’s just one photo. I like to use photos to add meaning to the content, but they don’t need to be displayed full size by default. Sometimes I might like to change an upload to show bigger, but that’s fairly rare.
2. on mobile, the experience uploading photos is already cumbersome but it’s made a bit worse when you want a grid because you have to pick the spot in the composer using your finger, remove empty lines, and then find the button to insert the grid on the first image.
3. Sometimes uploads fail for whatever reason which makes (3) even more frustrating and time consuming.
   
   
4. on mobile, navigating between photos feels a bit antiquated, and I have noticed people find it confusing and accidentally lose their place. Could we make it so they fill the whole screen and you can easily pinch and zoom and swipe left and right, like in other apps?

Maybe (1) could be a category setting? When enabled every image is in a grid, and the grid markdown is not needed at all nor the UI for adding it.

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

@tobiaseigen

When enabled every image is in a grid, and the grid markdown is not needed at all nor the UI for adding it.

So it’d be handled in the UI on the fly when viewing a post, rather than some [grid] tags being baked in to the post content?

[tobiaseigen]

Yeah, that was my thought. Something like the discotoc theme component.

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

@Richie

You get these appearing randomly

We also get endless variants of broken [grid] code-tags that we need to clean up all the time too, it’s not just whole grid tags on their own, it’s often partial bits of [grid] tags like this:

People simply aren’t aware they’ve broken something because they didn’t know it was there in the first place, or they don’t know that they’ve broken something - because they don’t know what is / was.

[Don]

Here are some example as well uploading didn’t success and broken all of it.
I don’t know emoji how goes there

[Heddson]

Any update regarding this?

I’m really hoping for a setting to disable it . Or at least to be able to change the minimum-image-number.