Masonry Layout Option

[Matt C.]

One important feature that I think the XenForo Media Gallery is missing is a masonry layout option, similar to XenGallery by sonnb. While the default layout is fine for most forums, I think the masonry layout is best for certain types of forums.

If anyone doesn't know what a masonry layout is (I'm assuming the XenForo developers do ), here is an explanation.
https://www.sitepoint.com/understanding-masonry-layout/

Here are some javascript libraries for masonry layouts that the developers could utilize, or they could develop their own of course.
https://masonry.desandro.com/layout.html
http://callmecavs.com/bricks.js/
http://salvattore.com/
http://macyjs.com/

Thank you.

 

[RobinHood]

This is one of the best parts about XenGallery for me too. Especially when browsing new photos. Makes for a much better browsing experience. I'm not keen on the way that XFMG has to crop images in order to display them all in a grid.

 

[CyberAP]

Better use CSS Grids for that, and calculate the proper spans on the server side.

 

[Kirby]

I wholeheartedly hate Pinterest
Browsing such webites is very stressful on the eye (at least for me).

So if this is offered as an option, why not.
But as default or even the only option: Hell no!

 

[Sim]

I get a lot of complaints from my members about the arbitrary cropping of thumbnail images to make them square - so a masonry layout could work well for us.

Personally, I really like the layout used on http://thereason.us/ where some of the landscape images take multiple columns - I find sites like pinterest tend to encourage portrait layout photos because they get far more prominence than landscape images do (the vast majority of images on our site are landscape layout).

 

[JRangelle]

I'd like to add some additional information on why Masonry is a better layout.

Masonry doesn't crop information out of the photo. When you post an album of human celebrities, fashion models, magazine spreads, or any other type of vertical-person-layout, you invariably crop off the head and legs and all you get is the torso. This is a real problem for image uploads of people. There's data in photos (like heads of humans!) that get lost with the cropping.

A corollary of the square cropping to threads is only showing the middle 100 characters of each post, regardless of the introduction or ending. We would never do that to textual content, so I'm not sure why we would try to apply that to visual content either.