Image Guidelines

There are two types of image you'll be posting on your app:

Images on Pages: When you have created a new Page to add (for example) a News Story, you can press the + icon then choose 'Image' to add an image to your page.

Featured Images: Using the Appearance Tab of a List or Page, you can give your content a featured image which is kind of like a thumbnail. This sits with the Title of your List or Page and the user taps on the featured image to open that content.

The only currently supported types of images are Jpg and PNG. If your image is any other format, you will need to convert it to one of these two formats. We do not currently support animated GIFS natively, but you can add these to your app by hosting them online and embedding them on a page using HTML.

Images on Pages

For these kinds of images, there are no particular dimension guidelines as these images will not be cropped when you add them to a Page. They will display just as they are:

With images you're adding to a Page, you may want to consider the file size of your image before uploading it to the CMS. Remember that your employees may be accessing your app using their mobile data, so it's a good idea to keep your images as small as you can while still retaining image quality. Avoid images larger than 1MB as a general rule. 

You can easily reduce the size of your images by using a free online resource such as https://tinypng.com.

Featured Images

You can give your content a Featured Image using the Appearance tab of your List, Page, or whatever type of content you're adding. It works the same way as adding an image to a page, where you'll be prompted to choose an image from your Media Library.

The most important difference between images on pages, and Featured Images is that when you add a Featured Image to your content, it will get cropped to fit within the 'tile' Featured Image container. 

Most of our List Layouts will crop your Featured Image to a square 1:1 aspect ratio like 500x500 or 1000x1000, etc. For example, you can see that all of the Featured Images in the following list have been cropped to fit within the square of each 'tile':

So if you want to make sure that the most important part of your image isn't automatically cropped out, you'll need to crop your image before you upload it to the CMS as a Featured Image.

There's a really easy way to do this on a Windows PC:

1. Double click on your image to open it in Windows Photo Viewer and press the Edit Image icon as shown below:

2. Now press the Edit Aspect Ratio icon at the bottom of the screen:

3. Choose the Square option, then drag the image selector to choose which part of the image gets included in your square selection (note, the exception is if your List Layout is the Letterbox layout, in which case you should choose 16:9):

4. Finally, use the Save Options button to save the image to your PC. You can then upload your image to the Thrive CMS and select it as the Featured Image for your content.