A guide to image settings

This article explains the different settings that can be applied to inline images.

James Peacock avatar
Written by James Peacock
Updated over a week ago
A snapshot of our image settings interface

Alt text

Alt text should be set for each image you upload that is intended to be used on the web. It is good for both SEO and accessibility, allowing screen readers to describe the image in question. With that in mind, the alt text should visually describe the image in a simple and succinct manner, without any flourish that might confuse visually impaired users such as URLs or call-to-actions like "Click here."

A bad example:

Click here to find out more about mountaineering

A good example:
โ€‹A person reaching a mountain summit at sunrise

Tip: Alt text can also be set when viewing an image from your Files & media library.

Crop

Think of crop as a window. When you change the crop, you don't delete the rest of the image, you just choose a part of it to be visible. We provide some common aspect ratios to get you started. For example, "Square" is useful for profile images or for social media posts. If however, you have a specific ratio you need an image to be, choose "Custom" and enter your values.

Tip: Crop doesn't use pixel values. In fact, it doesn't use any value. It's just a ratio. If you want to specify the physical dimension of an image, see Dimensions below.

Focus

When cropping an image, focus helps you choose which area is visible.

Crop direction

Use crop direction to position the image crop to your preference. For example, choosing "Centre" will always keep the centre of the image visible, and hide the surrounding areas. "Top-left" will always keep the top-left of the image visible, and so on.

Zoom

Use zoom to focus on a specific area, based on the crop direction that has been set. The maximum zoom is 400%.

Dimensions

Here you can provide precise dimensions in pixels, for example, if you have strict rules around images being no wider than 2,000px. In our editor, we always honour the aspect ratio specified in Crop. This is to prevent authors from accidentally stretching images by providing both width and height values.

  • Auto - the image will maintain its maximum physical size (taking crop into account).

  • Width/Height - set a max width or height. Enter a width value and the height will be calculated automatically, and vice-versa.

Entering a larger value than the original image will result in the image being distorted. It is recommended that you only specify dimensions that are smaller than the original image.

Tip: If using a square crop, entering a value for width or height will achieve the same result.

Quality

Enable "auto-compress" to reduce the file size of your image using best-effort techniques to maintain visual quality. Leave disabled if the results aren't as expected.

How we compress images by default

We apply some compression to images in our content editor in order to improve performance in our app. This compression is not applied at the destination (unless enabled in Quality), so the image you upload to Content Workflow is the image you get out, taking into consideration any cropping and dimensions that have been applied.


Note: Images and files uploaded before 15th March 2021 won't have their respective metadata available, including dimensions. Setting custom dimensions is still possible, but default values won't be visible.


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