The two cardinal sins of displaying image attachments on social media or instant messengers – cropping and overlays. Even my most normie friends these days have learned to send a “might be cropped” warning alongside photos or screenshots where important details are not right in the center. Because we’ve all been burned often enough by some smart algorithm that had to shave 20 pixels off, just so the result fits the beauty ideals of some idiotic design instead of being actually useful in the real world.

But that’s just a tangent – this example shows the other crime: Overlays. Just don’t do it. Never. Don’t try to be smart about it, you will not succeed. In this example it was impossible for me to view the full picture in the Mastodon web UI. Tapping the Hide button makes it go away – but also does indeed hide the entire image. The revealed image always has the Hide button on top of the entirety of a speech bubble of a web comic with three or four panels total. That is like 25% of the entire thing. Why can’t the button be below or above the image? Phones are the size of phablets these days anyway, don’t tell me there’s no screen estate.