Saturday 6 September 2008

Finding pictures of the correct aspect ratio

I was doing some work on a client's site and thought I'd need some pictures of a specific aspect ratio, but couldn't think where to find them so after a little research I came up with this:

We're looking for thumbnails with a classical 3:2 aspect ratio on a canvas 900px wide and we'll create a slideshow using jQuery lightBox. If our images are 300px wide and 200px tall (landscape) that'll allow us to have 3 on a row, alternatively we might have images that are 200px tall and only 133.333px wide (portrait) which'd be a bugger!

So we need to find an alternative sizing which'll work better... except I don't think there is one so we could change the aspect ratio to 4:3?

900/4 = 225px

Actually that's bollocks as Phil has pointed out that a good aspect ratio would be 3:2 as we could have a row of 4 landscapes at 225px wide and 150px tall or a row of 6 portraits at 150px wide and 225px tall.

That means we have can mix and match and have a set of 3 portraits and 2 landscapes on a row!

And using:

http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=img&cs=iso88591&q=dressage+aspect%3A150+height%3A333&rys=0&itag=crv

allows us to find landscape images of the correct aspect ratio and size (333px tall)!

Where as:

http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=img&cs=iso88591&q=dressage+aspect%3A66+height%3A500&rys=0&itag=crv

gives us portrait images of the correct aspect ratio and size for our slideshow!

Ahh nuts:

I could survive for 1 minute, 25 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor