Image Guidelines

Virtual Y uses Drupal’s Image Styles concept to allow you to upload a single image but display it in several ways. Image Styles automatically resize, crop, or otherwise manipulate images on display. This allows for consistent image presentation across the site, regardless of the original image dimensions. Because of this, there are no strict image dimensions required for images in your Virtual Y site.

We can, however, provide guidance on what images work best with the image styles used on the site:

• Use high-resolution images if possible, but compress them using a tool like TinyJPG or ImageOptim to ensure they are no more than 1-2MB. Large image files will slow down page load times.
• Use landscape-orientation images with a 4:3 or 16:9 ratio. These are common formats, so often no cropping is necessary.
• Square images are NOT recommended, as they are often cropped in unexpected ways.
• Images are sometimes cropped from the top and bottom, so ensure faces or other focal points are in the vertical center of the image. This will help prevent important content from being cropped out.

When including images for “Meta” (preview) purposes, such as for social media sharing, images should be at least 1080px in width.