Option to avoid cropping of poster images (local / embedded artwork)

Suggestions
1

I’d love to have an option for poster images to be displayed in original form: scaled down (or up) to fit the available frame, but centered instead of cropped, and with unrounded corners. Varying aspect ratios will mean that the grid no longer looks as even, but I think that’s fine (I kind of like the variability) and it’s a very rare case that the movie poster I have already curated is going to look bad with that treatment. If I do turn up any with an appreciably too-wide aspect ratio, I can override them myself. (If Infuse just allowed variability in the width rather than the height, I’m pretty sure that would be fine. Possibly even preferable.)

I found some old requests for this and I’m aware that the previous guidance has been to stop using local and embedded artwork. But throwing this out here to show some support for an option to handle local and embedded artwork differently.

Motivation: Fundamentally, I usually strongly prefer to pick my own artwork — usually an original movie poster (with some exceptions) — and I prefer to have that embedded in the file. Even if that weren’t the case, I have a reasonably large library with artwork I’ve curated over the course of building the library, and I don’t relish the idea of throwing that away and then painstakingly revising the result to get it back to my preferred state.

Some examples:

movie-thumbnails
movie-thumbnails827×415 52.5 KB

  • The Alien 3 poster is almost perfect, but the design runs very close to the edges, so Infuse’s rounded corners clip Sigourney’s name.

  • All Quiet on the Western Front has an even white border on all edges. (This is especially common with posters for old movies.) Infuse’s scaling results in the top and bottom being slightly clipped, resulting in the top/bottom borders looking mismatched with the left/right borders. The rounded corners also look bad due to the white borders.

  • Another Thin Man runs text very close to the top and bottom, and is narrower than Infuse’s enforced aspect ratio. (This too is pretty common on posters for old movies.) Infuse’s scaling results in the very top and bottom text being clipped.

Thanks for hopefully considering this.

2

I think if you follow the recommended artwork size recommendations for posters (Recommended poster size 1000 x 1500px, (1:1.5 ratio)) you may find the displays more to your preferences. I tested these original movie artwork posters and they look pretty good.

Test posters for aabernathy
Test posters for aabernathy1102×694 482 KB

3

Sure, I’m aware of the recommended sizes; what I’m requesting is an option for different behavior which (IMO) handles things better when 1) things aren’t the Infuse-recommended size / aspect ratio; and 2) the poster is the recommended size but the appearance suffers when rounded corners are applied.

Thanks for going to the effort of trying the specific movies I mentioned, but there are some differences. The Alien 3 poster you chose is not the poster I used (and I prefer the poster I chose). The white borders for the All Quiet poster still look odd with rounded corners (though the balance is correct in your poster, and based on that I found one which works correctly as well). As for Another Thin Man, I don’t know where you got that poster; I looked on The Internet Movie Poster Awards site but it didn’t have a poster for that movie; The Movie DB has several but I couldn’t find that poster design with the exact right aspect ratio. (As it turns out, it has an alternate poster design I’m happy with, and I can use that.)

Regardless, even assuming I get the Another Thin Man poster you found, and I live with odd corners for posters with borders like All Quiet, Alien 3 hasn’t yet been addressed, and those are just three examples in a much larger library. What I’m lobbying for is a display option (option — not requesting that it be imposed of everyone) which both gives me results I prefer, and doesn’t require me to redo metadata for a significant portion of my library.