Medium Has an Image Problem

I have a gripe.

Don’t get me wrong—I like Medium as a platform. However, since starting to write articles last year, there is one problem that has frustrated me to the core: images.

You wouldn’t notice this problem if you only use the large built-in Unsplash gallery. Or if you get your pictures from places like Google Images. In fact, you wouldn’t notice it if you avoid the Medium mobile app altogether.

Most writers use full scale images, and this is never a problem. For writers like myself though, it can be a different story.

Often I will use portion-based screenshots in my articles—because that’s the nature of what I do. It was whilst writing my ‘How to Build a Custom Ribbon in Excel’ story this problem became most apparent. I needed to capture numerous screenshots of controls contained in the custom ribbon I was explaining.

Take a look at this button on your desktop web browser:

Just in case you’re not looking at this page on a desktop, here’s another one for you:

Looks all right, doesn’t it?

Now let’s look at how this same button appears in the Medium app on my iPhone 11:

Utterly hideous!

I did not ask for a button that occupies 100% of the screen width. I only wanted it to be the same size as the desktop one. Is that really too much to ask for? 😩

The makeshift solution is to go into Photoshop and create Artboards with a canvas width of 1000px and paste the images onto them — before exporting. Shouldn’t really have to do this though, should I?

I hope Medium fixes this. And it’d be even better if they gave us more options for our images, such as the ability to crop and resize them.

Here’s hoping…